Deadly Appearances (29 page)

I awoke in an unfamiliar room, in a strange bed that still, in its soft flannelette sheets, held the smell of sex. Of course, they wouldn’t have had time to change the sheets. And outside the room, voices young and deep and urgent.

“Mieka, I know you love her. I’m going to love her, too, but you could smell the Scotch a mile away. Babe, if that’s the problem, we need to help her. I’m not saying we don’t. I’m saying face it.”

And then my daughter’s voice, strong, defending me. “She’s not a drunk, Greg. Even at the worst, she didn’t go that route. She’s been through so much and she wasn’t over that horror show about Daddy. Nobody could come through what’s happened to her without some sort of reaction. They would have had to peel me off the walls of my rubber room. But she’s not a drunk. It has to be something else.”

Good old Mieka, defender of embarrassing mothers. I curled up and went to sleep and dreamed strange dreams: Rick Spenser in Mieka’s kitchen making bread, pulling points of dough from a long, thin baguette. Soren Eames at the kitchen table with Andy, laughing and saying to Rick, “Now don’t forget a seed for you and a seed for me and one for the master,” and then the bell on the stove ringing and ringing and then floating up through consciousness to the knowledge that the phone was ringing. I picked it up.

“Joanne Kilbourn speaking.”

On the other end, husky-voiced and excited, was Hilda McCourt. “Well, Mrs. Kilbourn, may I call you Joanne? I feel we’re into an adventure together, so let’s use first names.”

“Fine, Hilda. What did you find out?” My voice sounded a hundred years old.

“Nothing, absolutely nothing. Someone sliced through the microfiche.”

I felt a prickle of excitement. “Someone did what?”

“Sliced through the microfiche. The board transferred all their school records to microfiche a couple of years ago. Joanne, do you know what microfiche are?”

“Those films that you scoot through a projector and then you see your document on a screen?”

She laughed. “Well, that’ll do. Apparently someone scooted the grade twelve records of E.T. Russell High School through the blade of a knife.”

“When?”

“The people at the board don’t know. Employees are in and out of there all the time. You’re supposed to sign in and out, but they’re quite lax. These aren’t precious documents or even particularly confidential ones. Twenty-five-year-old school records have pretty well done whatever damage they’re going to do.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said. I felt deflated, and I guess I sounded weary.

“Are you all right?” The surprisingly young voice was alert, concerned.

“Well, I’m going to disembowel the next person who asks me that, but, yeah, I think I’m okay, just disappointed. I think that boy’s name could help us.”

The us I meant was Rick Spenser and me, but Hilda McCourt, my co-adventurer, picked up the reference happily.

“I agree, Joanne, I believe it can help us, but don’t despair. I have an excellent memory, and I expect that name will surface. Now give me your Regina number so I can call you as soon as it does.”

I gave her the number.

“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” she said, “never fear, and when we do I still have almost half that bottle of Glenlivet left for our celebration.”

I shuddered. “Almost half!” I thanked her, lay back in bed and drifted off to sleep.

When I woke it was dark. I looked at my watch: five o’clock. I listened for street sounds. Almost none; it must, I reasoned, be morning – 5:00 a.m. in the morning, as Lori Evanson would say. I felt weak but purged, and better. My overnight bag was at the foot of the bed. I pulled out clean clothes, tiptoed down the hall and showered and changed. I wrote Mieka and Greg a note, thanking them, explaining I was much better, apologizing without sounding pitiful, and crept downstairs. They were asleep on the living-room floor with their arms curled around one another: the title of a novel,
The Young in One Another’s Arms
.

If I could remember the title of a Canadian novel, I must be all right. I looked again into the living room at my daughter’s dark blond hair fanned out against the crook of that unnervingly male arm, said a prayer, took a deep breath and walked out the door.

Except for a stop halfway home for take-out coffee and a foil-wrapped Denver, I drove straight through. I was home in time to give the boys lunch and answer Mieka’s anxious phone call. Yes, I was better, yes, I had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon, yes, it was a specialist, highly recommended, Morton Lee’s brother, and yes, I would call as soon as I knew anything.

When I hung up, I didn’t even bother going upstairs to get a blanket. I grabbed my coat and, like a transient in a bus station, I covered myself with it and fell asleep where I was.

CHAPTER

19

The gastroenterologist’s office was the top floor of a medical building so old it had an elevator operator. The waiting room was oddly comforting although it took me a while to understand why. There were the usual stacks of magazines with cover stories about things that had once seemed important and pages soft with use, and there was the standard office furniture, Naugahyde and steel tubing. But there wasn’t that heart-stopping medical feeling, and as the receptionist, a young Chinese woman, exotic as a forties’ movie villain, raised a perfectly manicured hand and flicked a lighter into flame, I recognized why. The whole place smelled of cigarette smoke. No signs from the cancer society. No cute cartoons. There were ashtrays, and people were using them. I closed my eyes and that smell, acrid and familiar, mixed with the alien smell of things plunged into sterile baths and ripped from sterile wrappings, carried me back to doctors’ waiting rooms when I was young, and to doctors who measured and weighed and made jokes about school and husbands and the future.

When I stood to follow the receptionist into the examining room, I felt my stomach cramp, but safe in the smoky air, I said, “Nothing bad can happen here.”

The beautiful Chinese woman raised a perfectly waxed eyebrow and, in the flat accents of small-town Saskatchewan, said, “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.” Then she turned and glided out of the room on her stiletto heels.

The examining room had a spectacular view of the city, and as I stood and watched the late afternoon traffic, I heard in the next room a man’s voice talking on the telephone about some property he had bought. I heard the name “Little Bear Lake” and then, after a while, the word “developer.” The conversation was heated. Someone hadn’t checked something and now the building couldn’t start “till spring if ever,” I heard the voice say. Then something muffled and finally, very distinct and loud, “You can tell those rubes I’ll drag them into the tall grass on this one.” A phone slammed down, then the door to the examining room opened and Dr. Philip Lee walked in.

Physically he was as unlike his brother, Mort, as it was possible to be. Mort was a teddy bear of a man – “A Panda bear,” Ali said once, “after all, the man was born in Hong Kong and half the family’s still there.” But there was nothing cuddly about Dr. Philip Lee. He was tall, balding and scholarly looking. He bowed slightly toward me.

“I apologize, Mrs. Kilbourn, for the delay – a consultation.”

“Well,” I said, sitting on the examining table, “if the developers fall through, you can always build yourself a cottage. Little Bear Lake is beautiful, especially in the spring.”

He looked at me sharply and nodded. “Mrs. Kilbourn, in your estimation, what seems to be the trouble?”

I went through the whole dismal history, starting with the first attack in the middle of the night after the boys and I ordered pizza and ending with my performance at Mieka’s the day before. I finished by saying, “I have no opinion – I’m the patient. In the other doctor’s opinion, the problem is stress. It’s all in my head.”

Dr. Philip Lee gave me a wintery smile. “That is, of course, one possibility, but let’s eliminate the more interesting possibilities of the body first.”

The physical examination he gave me was gruelling, “from mouth to anus” as he told me gravely when he began. After it was over, I dressed and the receptionist led me into the doctor’s office.

“I see nothing,” he said, lighting a Marlboro and inhaling deeply. “We must, of course, await the test results, but everything appears to be entirely normal.”

“So you agree that there’s nothing wrong with me.”

“At this point, I would agree with my colleague that there appears to be no physical cause for your symptoms.”

“It’s all in my head, then.”

“That possibility cannot be ruled out,” he said judiciously. “I’m going to write you a prescription for a little nostrum of my own. You are extremely tense and you appear not to be eating well.”

“What’s in this little cure of yours?”

“Something to relax you and some vitamins. Since you are not a medical person, the names would mean nothing to you.”

I shredded Dr. Philip Lee’s prescription into the old brass ashtray in the lobby of the medical building. On the way home I stopped at a strip mall and bought a quart of milk, some dark rum and a dozen eggs. “Just what the doctor ordered,” I said, lifting my glass in a kitchen filled with the good smell of rum and eggnog, “something to relax the patient.”

The doctor called four days later. I was in the granny flat sorting through some of the early press clippings about Andy. He attempted to be genial, and I had a strong suspicion that Dr. Philip Lee had talked to his brother in Winnipeg, “the one with the charm.” He was certainly trying harder.

The test results were negative.

“Good,” I said, “wonderful news.”

Had the prescription helped?

“Absolutely,” I said.

Then I was feeling better?

“Right as rain,” I said, but I had to hang up because a spasm hit and I doubled over with pain.

Pain – that was one of the new constants in my life. The other one was fear. Entry after entry in my daybook began with the single word “sick,” and then the symptoms: “cramps, diarrhea, metallic taste in the mouth, have to spit all the time.” The last words were underscored in exasperation. And there were the symptoms that couldn’t be neatly categorized: the increasingly frequent times when I had problems getting air in and out of my lungs; the sense that there was a band of steel wrapped around my chest; the strange and terrifying tricks my heart was playing, pounding when I was sitting idle at my desk in the granny flat, skipping beats when I did something as simple as walk across the room.

The pretty young woman with the curly hair who was one of the family practitioners in Ali Sutherland’s old practice made an appointment for me with a cardiologist. The cardiologist taped disks to me and hooked me up to a machine.

“Good news,” she said, smiling, “nothing is wrong. Perhaps a short-term use of tranquillizers?”

Craig Evanson called me one morning to ask me to go to the correctional centre and visit Eve, and I promised I would go soon. He had thrown himself into Eve’s case with a passion that surprised me. The floppy man had been superseded by a tense, driven stranger. “The shrink who pops in and out of there is worried about her, Jo. He says she’s shutting down. The way he explained it to me was it’s like closing off rooms in a house. First you close the public rooms and then the guest rooms, until you box yourself into one little room. The problem is Eve’s run out of rooms to shut down.”

I knew how Eve felt. I was running out of rooms to shut down, too. Except for the boys, I stopped seeing people. November had settled in grey with misery. The easy, communal times when you stand out on the front lawn and visit with neighbours and people riding by on bikes or pushing babies in strollers were gone till spring. The focus of life had turned indoors, and indoors it was easy to say no to people. Everyone was understanding. The leadership convention was set for December fifth, so there were phone calls soliciting support and phone calls asking me to help write rules for the rules committee or to chair the balloting committee or to buy a ticket to the leader’s dance. I told everyone the same thing. I’d been ill, and on doctor’s orders I was resting and recuperating and getting back my strength. “And besides” I would add, clinching it, “I’m working on a biography of Andy.”

For a few weeks Mieka called every day, but after I’d relayed my passing grades from Philip Lee and the cardiologist, she followed my lead and wrote off the episode in her kitchen as an understandable if unendearing reaction to stress.

I did the best I could with the boys. I sat down for breakfast with them in the morning, had lunch ready at noon, sat around for an hour or so with them at dinner time, took them to the Lakeshore Club on Saturday mornings. But children get used to most things, and the boys simply grew used to my being sick. They were kind always, but they had lives of their own: school and friends and football and hockey.

And, I had to admit, precedent was against me. They had seen this pattern after their father’s death. Then as now, I was short-tempered and withdrawn. Then as now, the granny flat had become my refuge.

One windy day I drove out to see Eve. We sat in the pale sunlight of the visiting area in the hospital wing, two women who had been defeated, and played a listless game of double solitaire. The irony of our choice of game struck me on the way home, and I had to pull over because when I laughed, I started the bands tightening in my chest again.

Yes, I understood about shutting down rooms. By the second week in November, I had pretty well shut down all the rooms but one: the big room over the garage where I could close out the world, my clean, well-lighted place. Except keeping it clean had become a burden. Every so often the heating ducts would gather their strength and belch out a fresh dusting of summer pollen, and I would have to fill a bucket with hot sudsy water and scrub everything down.

One day when I was carrying the pail my legs began to twitch uncontrollably, the way an eyelid sometimes twitches spasmodically, for no reason. I had to sit down with my bucket until the twitching stopped. That night in bed the twitching started again. The next morning I added twitching to my list of symptoms.