Believing Cedric (36 page)

Melissa, looking into the shedding trees, thought this over, staring past the sloping granite and its splotches of lichen, past the branches, into the shadows between the twigs.

And it was something she kept thinking about, for weeks afterwards, even today, sitting peacefully on her couch before work, earmarking the pages she was going to read to Eamon later on this evening. And she probably would have continued to think about it, had her father not shown up out of the blue, without having seen her in more than four years.

Cedric was standing on her landing now, two feeble knocks and a glance over his shoulder, while waiting for her to open the door. Melissa was nervous, wondering what might have sparked such a visit, panning through the worst-case scenarios, a shaky hand on the latch, only opening the door enough to squeeze her body into the gap. “Wow. Dad. Hi. What—uh . . . what are you doing here?”

Cedric almost seemed as confused as she was. “Melissa. Hey. How are ya, kiddo? You've uh . . . you've grown up a bit. But look good, healthy.” An ungainly pause, trying hard to be a pleasant one. “Yeah. So. Would you . . .” he looked past her, into the house. “Could I . . . come in?”

“Uhm, yeah, sure, yeah, here.” She flung the door open and stepped back until she was standing in front of the bay window, waiting to find out what was happening, her arms crossed, one of her hips cocked to the side. “So . . . What's up?” Melissa catalogued the changes in his body since last she'd seen him, his belly protruding a little more, a bit of added flesh sagging beneath his chin, hair growing thinner.

“Oh nothing.” He sighed, looking around the room. “I just thought I'd drop by and . . .” He cleared his throat, turned back to her. “Actually, you know, I might as well cut the crap. The truth is that, well, something . . . crazy's happening inside my head, and . . . and I'm here . . . because . . . Well, I don't really know what I'm doing here, to be honest.”

“Right. Uhm. Dad, you're not making any sense. Just so you know.” He looked so out of place, standing here among her private things, in the living room of her intimate world.

“I know.”

“Okay. So.” Melissa lifted a hand to scrunch at her hair. “Uh, do you want some tea or something?”

Cedric inhaled, seemed to hold his breath. “No, thanks.”

“Coffee?”

“Look . . . See this weekend, I drove out here to meet a new client, who invited me to . . . play some golf at a new course that . . . isn't all that far from here. And, well, I was on my way home, and passed by a sign with your town on it—or the town your mother told me you were living in anyway.”

“Okay. So you thought you'd just . . . drop by? I mean, it's nice to see you and all, but, I haven't
really
heard from you in a while, Dad. It's kind of . . . odd, just stopping in like this. No?”

“Well, see that's the thing. I . . . didn't stop in. I just . . . kept driving. I mean, I chickened out, is what I'm saying. Because it would've been too awkward and, you know, like you say, it's been a long time. But, see, the point is that I
wished
it, you know? I
wished
I'd had the balls to turn around, and pull into your driveway, and maybe, maybe even say that I always, I don't know, that I was . . . that I know that I've been . . . a bit of a . . .”

“Dad.” Melissa was taken aback at how quiet her voice was. “You don't . . . have to . . .”

“I know. But I didn't . . . I mean, do . . . a lot of things . . . that I . . . wish I had, and . . . and . . .”

“Yeah. Well.” Melissa swallowed, shifting her weight onto her other hip, recrossing her arms. “So, anyway, you were saying, you turned around and you . . . ? How did you know . . . where I live? Did you stop and ask someone or something?”

Cedric waved a hand to give a simple answer but found, confusingly, that he didn't have one. “I . . .” he searched the carpet near his feet, then the coffee table. “That's a good point. I . . . you know I don't know. I just . . . I . . . just came. I just . . . drove here.”

As Cedric looked back up at her, the room was wavering, the paint becoming unfocused, the pictures on the walls shaking in a soundless blur. Then his daughter, standing in front of him, flickered into transparency a few times, reappearing as solid and concrete as she was before, watching him, waiting for him to answer. Then her image flickered again, much in the way that the old eight millimetre projectors did, he thought, just before reaching the end of a reel or slipping through an amateur splice job, a few frames from a blank section flittering in, flashing out; or like words, words that you know you've seen in a text before, being repeated somewhere else, lighting up, fading away. Until her form fluttered a last time and vanished from in front of him, instantly reappearing on the couch, sitting there now, suddenly comfortable, reading an earmarked page, a cup of tea in her other hand, like she'd never gotten up to answer the door in the first place.

“Melissa.” Cedric heard that his voice had become hollow, fragmented, remote. He could barely hear it himself, while she, judging by her lack of reaction, couldn't hear it at all. He spoke louder, almost a shout, “Melissa!” Nothing.

The cat, a young tabby, who had been staring groggily into the centre of the room, approximately where Cedric was standing, swished its tail, an ear cupping to the side. Its tired stare rose a bit, nearing Cedric's face, distantly listening to something, for something.

Cedric, baffled and squinting, turned around to look at his car in the driveway. It wasn't there. Then he lifted his hand in front of his face, looked down at his feet, his legs, and things started to become clear to him, started to fall into place. Of course, he thought, of course. It had been almost obvious, the whole time. He'd just never let himself consider it.

He turned again to his daughter on the couch. “You know what's crazy?” he asked in a normal volume, not trying to get her attention anymore, speaking at her, not with her. “I've been trying to convince all these people—these people who I open my eyes to and flash away from a minute later—trying to convince them that something was happening to me, something strange and profound and mysterious. I've been trying to get them to believe that this experience was real, that it was important, and . . . While there was really only one person that had to
get
it, you know? That had to believe what this was all about.” And finally—finally—Cedric did. He understood. And with that understanding, he grinned softly.

He noticed from the cover of her book that she was reading poetry, and it made him think of something else he wanted to say. “Melissa.” The cat's glare lifted to another part of the room, still searching distractedly, sleepily. “You probably don't remember this, but you weren't there when I picked up the last of my things from the house, and your mother wasn't either. And with no one around, do you know what I did? I went into your room, where you kept all those poems you were always writing, and I looked through some of them, even read a few. I picked one, for no real reason that I can remember, and took it with me. Stole it. I kept it in the top drawer of my desk. It was a long poem, or a series of them anyway, stapled together, numbered with roman numerals. They were recounting a man's life, a famous chemist or botanist I think, something like that. And I can't help but think that, maybe, when you find out . . . you might write something like it . . . about me. My life. You know. Maybe.”

The cat, giving up on the sounds, put its chin onto the sofa and closed its eyes, intent on finding sleep again as soon as it could. It licked its tiny lips, swallowed, sighed.

Melissa turned the page.

In the living room's bay window, a myriad of individual clouds—the kind that are only seen in autumn—glided through the sky, all of them moving in the same direction. From one nameless place, to another.

How gently the tires rolled off the shoulder,

swathing through the grass to the trees;

where some of the smaller ones splintered

and the thickest were bark-gashed, bleeding resin.

The quiet that followed was a devoted one, assuring,

the only sound the vivid foliage, dropping

with a gentle plink onto the roof, tapping

the pulverized safety glass, its intricate geometry

opaque and glimmering as crystalline snow, leaves

sliding down it with the fffff of toboggans.

Like torn triangles of construction paper,

they piled onto the wipers,

a glueless collage.

Meanwhile the powder from the airbags cascaded a slat of sun,

dust pale as talcum, or as the flour I was once allowed to touch

on frosted rolling pins, doughy countertops where

cookie-cut entrails lay limp and forgotten.

Resting my head against the driving wheel

I found the pillow to be hard and rubber-coated,

far from the afternoon bed of an elementary sick day;

an observation I tried to get out of my head, tried to replace

with something a little more inspired or noteworthy, momentous.

But I never did.

The phone was red. And what William hated most about it, besides the fact that it was inconveniently mounted on a wall in a tight corner (and at a strange angle), was that when it rang it was so gratingly loud that you could actually see the cherry receiver quavering as you picked it up. He shook his head in the relieving silence, put it to his ear. “Yes?” Then he leaned over the tiny and strangely angled desk to write on a pad of paper there, pen out of his jacket pocket, clicked and already jotting down the information, a glance at his watch, time and date scrawled onto the top left-hand corner. “Mm-hmm, all right. And how long ago did the call come in? Mm-hmm. Okay. So you're more or less ten minutes away then, is that about right, John? All right. We'll be ready for you. Thanks.” William hung up, fiddling with the twists of the phone cord afterwards, flattening them against the wall, and stepped back out of the corner, giving the receiver a final disapproving look.

William walked into the reception area and listed off the information to one of the nurses in passing, who put down what she was doing and walked away in a relative hurry. He continued down the hall to a small office where Hanif Khaled, who'd just arrived for his shift, was looking over some patients' charts. Technically, William was free to go, having handed off his responsibilities to Hanif the moment the intern had arrived, but he also knew that, with a call like this, coming from the red phone as it had, he wouldn't be leaving any time soon. Not that that was a problem; it was the nature of the beast of rural medicine really, and something you had to get used to if you wanted to practise it.

“Hanif,” William spoke in a low and direct tone. “It
sounds
 . . .” he checked his watch, “like we've got a code coming in in about eight minutes. Janet's prepping the room now. So uh . . .” he adjusted the watch on his wrist, “I'll be staying behind to help out of course.”

Hanif, who, in the few days that he'd been there had already made the impression of being a confident and competent intern, paled a bit with the news, though quickly postured and gave a solid nod, already on his toes and striding out of the room. “Thank you. I would . . . appreciate thahd very much, Doctor Kirbee.”

He rounded the corner and in a glimmer of subtle body language, William, who was following right behind him, understood—without needing to verify or point it out—that so far in Hanif's brief career, he hadn't yet handled a code, and maybe hadn't even assisted in one. This would be his first. William hoped things went well for him.

William Kirby had been a doctor in Haliburton for twenty-four years. He'd schooled in London, Ontario, grown up in Oshawa, and spent every summer of his childhood on Spruce Lake, one of the hundreds of bodies of water around Haliburton, jumping from his parents' dock, with the family's golden retriever stretching out in the dripping air behind him. When he'd made the move from the city, it was in 1983, the same week a Boeing 767 sunk out of the sky due to a metric conversion error with its fuel levels, having to land on a small Manitoba runway as a jawdroppingly oversized glider. William remembers talking about the incident with the neighbour on either side of him, and getting the feeling that there was going to be more to this rural living than what he'd drawn from holiday recollections and reveries. To begin with, he realized that people there could be divided into two groups, his neighbours representative of one each: vacationers and locals. The former thought of themselves, unequivocally, as the latter; and the latter detested, unequivocally, the former.

This being the middle of October, it was the time of year when, with the last of the leaves, the last of the vacationers left; and so was also a time when William, as a local, was supposed to rejoice at their departure, supposed to be glad for the rustling quietude they left behind; squirrels free to skitter along the baring branches frenetic and nervy, the sound of fishing boats eerily absent, while hunters patrolled the back roads with their guns and camouflage, beer-bellied soldiers ranked and filed for winter bragging rights. But, truth be told, he found himself more leaden than lightened, found the shoulder season one that made his shoulders hunch, turned him inward, left him more introspective and reticent. He noticed the smell of leaves that burned through the autumn drizzle, the mist of raindrops seeming less to put out the fires and more to feed the smoke. Noticed the pine needles that collected along the windward shores, floating and undulating on the surfaces of the lakes, pressed into a tight carpet of geometric patterns, sodden-matchstick mosaics. He became aware of the autumn flowers speckling the ditches in their carefully subdued hues, drawing little attention to themselves, as if deliberately, as if working quietly and tirelessly at some mysterious aim, something that hovered just above their mere survival, stamens prodding spellbindingly into the cool air: witch hazel, goldenrod, ladies' tress, aster.