I don’t remember much of the time in between. What I mean is, the time between my fall and the superintendent coming in. I was in and out of consciousness. I know I tried to reach for the telephone on the night table. And I remember seeing how dusty the floor was under my bed. Cobwebs everywhere. I was mortified. I wondered if these were the kinds of thoughts people had while they waited to die: the embarrassment of filth and the fear of discovery.
Mostly, I thought of my son.
There aren’t many bright spots in our days, but Hilda, the social coordinator, tries to keep us entertained. Every now and then, she brings in a children’s choir. Other times, there’s a tea social that only leaves us nostalgic for the lives we used to live. Once, Hilda brought in a dog. A black and brown beagle with a tail like a flagpole. I didn’t like the way it looked at me with its rheumy eyes and twitching snout. I refused to pet it.
“I didn’t know you were afraid of dogs,” Hilda said.
“I’m not,” I said. Then, because I knew that answer would likely lead to more questions, I said, “I’m not good with animals.”
I sit with three other people during meals: Irene, Henry and Jim. We don’t talk much. Mainly nudge and point to the things we need. Irene chews with her mouth open. Half the food tumbles out and down her bib and onto the table. It’s nauseating, and if I don’t keep my eyes down at all times, I lose my appetite. I told one of the nurses that I wanted to move to another table and she said she’d look into it, but I know that nothing will come of it. Nothing comes of anything in this place. The staff don’t listen to you. They bully you into taking your pills or making your poops or eating your food so that they can leave for home. I watch them tear across the parking lot towards their cars, a blur of uniform.
I do my best to finish my fish sticks, but they’re horrible. Soggy. The cooks bake them, which I know is healthier. But I’m eighty-six now. I’ll take my chances with trans fats. All around me, I hear the clatter of cutlery against plates and the occasional wet plop of something hitting the floor. Someone starts hacking (likely that woman from 405—she’s a smoker) and I think how sad that these are my final meals.
After lunch, I’m wheeled back to my room and positioned between the bed and the wall. I’ll usually try to nap in the afternoon as it helps to quicken the wait until dinner, but Ruth is already passed out in her chair. I press my eyes shut, willing myself to fall asleep before the snoring starts, but it’s a lost cause.
“Hello, Joyce.”
I look up to see Hilda coming into the room. She’s a tall woman, although everyone seems tall when you’re in a wheelchair. There’s a strand of chunky turquoise beads around her neck.
“How was lunch?” She sits down at the foot of my bed.
“Fine,” I say. “We had fish. Is it Friday?”
She nods. “Are you Catholic?”
“United,” I say.
“They have a service every Sunday downstairs.”
“I know.”
“Are you a religious woman?”
“Not particularly. But we’ll see what happens on my deathbed.”
“I have a new volunteer starting tonight. A young man. Do you mind if I send him to you?”
“What does he want?” Most of the volunteers are women.
“Nothing. He’s coming for conversation or errands or whatever you like.” She leans in and lowers her voice. “He goes by Timothy. Not Tim. He was quite firm about that.”
She waits for me to respond. I say nothing.
“A friend once told me that when a man goes by the long version of his name, chances are …” She laughs. “It’s nice, though, having a male volunteer for once.”
There are a handful of puffy women volunteers, running around before the bake sales or planting impatiens in the front garden, their eyeglass strings swaying this way and that. Well intentioned, I suppose, but intrusive. They make me uncomfortable when they come into my room, asking if my plants need watering or my pillows need fluffing or my water jug needs filling. No, no and no, I say, anxious for them to leave. I don’t need their short-breathed fussing. This is my room. I didn’t ask for their help, did I?
“Timothy will be coming in after dinner,” Hilda says, standing up from the bed. “Around seven.” She glances over at Ruth, who is now sucking back air like it’s food at a buffet.
“I think you’ll like him, Joyce.”
“The only thing I’d like …” I begin. Hilda leans towards me, waiting. She wants something from me. A surrender. This will make her dogs and choirs worthwhile.
“The only thing I’d like is a nap,” I say.
For some reason, I never thought I’d spend my final years in Balsden, even though it’s the only place I’ve ever lived. I grew up on Shaw Street, and then spent my married life on Marian Street. After I sold the house, I moved into a seniors’ apartment building on Finch Avenue. Now I’m here. And while Balsden is a small city of forty thousand, it’s only now that I realize how tiny my world has been. The four cornerstones of my life have been within a ten-minute drive of one another.
“There isn’t anything on earth you can’t find in your own backyard,” my mother used to say.
I remember as a girl standing on our back porch, contemplating the pine trees and the wire fence that circled the yard, the laundry poles and the ants whose grey-sugar castles sprang from the cracks in the concrete. I believed in these things and my mother’s words. Perhaps, in some ways, I still do. In other ways, I think they’re lies.
I was certain I’d end up in Andover, a much larger city, only forty minutes from Balsden via the double-lane highway or the old one with its winding single lane winding through towns and farmers’ fields. Life seemed better in Andover. People were cut from a different cloth. There was a university and a downtown park with a bandshell and a rink where people went skating in the winter. When we were young, my best friend, Fern, my older sister, Helen, and I would take the train to go shopping for back-to-school clothes. That seems so far back in the past, I question it. That’s the problem with getting old. Time bends and shifts. Memories spring up, uprooted. Sometimes, I’m not sure if my life happened the way I remember it, and there’s no one left to verify the facts.
Fern moved to Andover after she sold her house. She had a cousin there and asked me to go with her.
“We’ll get an apartment,” she said. “Raise some hell.”
But I was grounded by fear, afraid that my money would run out in a larger, more expensive city. And I had to consider Helen. She’d been in and out of the hospital on account of her heart. When she died a year later, I reconsidered. There was nothing left for me in Balsden. I was alone. But then Fern was found dead one morning. And when her cousin called to tell me, I became aware of something I never thought possible: that solitude had another floor down.
No matter. Maybe I deserved it. No freedom for someone like me. No respite from guilt. Everything I ever did in life, I did wrong. Everything I touched, I destroyed.
I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to watch my soap opera. I wish I had a pair of earphones. Stupid Ruth. Oh, it doesn’t matter. My mind is fluttering around like a distracted bird anyway. Timothy. Not Tim. I rub my hands, trying to loosen muscles that feel more like strips of jerky.
A while later, an attendant comes in with our afternoon snack. Today, I get two digestive cookies and a blood pressure pill.
“You’re looking well today, Mrs. Sparks,” I’m told. It’s the Filipina woman. I forget her name and I can’t read her badge. She’s just a wisp of a thing, a pink peppermint stick in her uniform. “How are you feeling?”
“My neck hurts,” I say, even though it’s no better or worse than usual. “My hands, too.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Filipina woman says, tipping the contents of the tiny white cup into my palm. She hands me a glass of apple juice with a straw bent like an elbow. I could’ve told her I was pregnant and she would’ve asked me if I wanted ice in my glass.
I’m nervous after dinner. The meatballs I ate roll up the sides of my stomach, threatening escape. I don’t want to see anyone. I can’t be bothered to make small talk with a stranger. I’ll wheel out of the room and sit at the end of the hall. He won’t know where to find me.
I have to go to the bathroom, but there isn’t time. That’s the problem with being in this chair. Everything is such a production. They have to wheel in this monstrosity of a machine, hook me under my arms, manoeuvre me to the bathroom and lower me over the toilet. The entire process pulverizes whatever shards of dignity I have left. Once they get me on the toilet, they leave me there. I was once in the bathroom for a good thirty minutes before someone decided to come back. It frightened the daylights out of me.
No. I can’t risk the bathroom. I’ll have to hold it in. I wheel around to grab my purse when there’s a soft knock at the door.
“Mrs. Sparks?”
I freeze. Should I fake deafness? Or sleep? I won’t talk to him. I don’t want to meet any—
“Ma’am?”
The voice is closer now. He’s stepped into the room. I make out his reflection in the window. I won’t have it. Hilda had no right to do this.
“Yes, I’m Mrs. Sparks.”
“I’m Timothy. The new volunteer.”
“I don’t need anything right now,” I say. “The nurse already came by and filled up my water jug.”
“Oh.” There’s a pause. “I didn’t know I was supposed to do that.”
I turn and am shocked by his youth. He could be my son. No, I remind myself. John would’ve been in his sixties by now. Impossible to believe. This young man looks around thirty (although most people look thirty to me). His hair is dark and short. He’s wearing a white polo shirt and his arms are hairy. I smell nutmeg. Cologne? He smiles awkwardly and half waves at me, as though we’ve just spotted one another from across a field. I look down at his shoes. Sneakers with white laces. Stylish, I suppose. I suddenly feel self-conscious. Why has Hilda sent him to me? She knows nothing about me.
“You have a lovely room,” he says, stepping towards the window.
“The view isn’t much.” I rub my hands. “At least we don’t get the late-day sun. Those rooms on the west side heat up like ovens. You’d think we deserve air conditioning at this stage of our lives.”
“Have you been living here long?”
“Yes.”
“And you?” He turns to Ruth.
“She can’t hear you. She’s not of sound mind.” I tap my temple to make sure the message is clear.
He nods and blushes.
“I’m afraid Hilda misinformed you, Timothy. I don’t need a volunteer. I get by on my own just fine.”
“Oh.”
“It’s her job, you see. To try and make us feel better. About being old. About being in this place. There are other people who could use your company more than me.”
“I shouldn’t have waltzed in like that.”
“You didn’t know.”
“Better to be up front with one another than to sit suffering through polite formalities.” He glances over at the photo of John on my night table. “Who’s that?”
My back stiffens. “My son.”
“Does he visit?”
“He had cancer. He died a long time ago.” My finger pokes the air. “Did Hilda tell you that already?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why are you asking about him?”
He crosses his arms. “I didn’t
ask
you about your son. I only asked about the picture. I was simply trying to make conversation.”
“That’s the problem with this place. Everyone sticking their noses into everyone else’s business.”
“On that note.” He turns around. “Have a nice evening, Mrs. Sparks.”
My fingers grip the arms of my chair. It doesn’t have to be this way, I remind myself.
I
don’t have to be this way. I clear my throat.
“I suppose Hilda gives you a list of people to visit.”
He eyes me cautiously as he pulls a piece of paper from his pocket and hands it over. I hold the paper close to my face and scan the names. “Maureen will talk your ear off. Francie complains all the time. Who is this? Doris? No. Doreen. She’s hard of hearing. Ronald tends to cry. He had a stroke a few months back. Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you.” I pass the list back to him.
He takes the paper and folds it into a small square. I notice his hands. They’re nice. Strong. John’s hands. I feel my heart fold up like the piece of paper.
“Take care, Mrs. Sparks,” he says, and gives a quick nod in Ruth’s direction.
I watch him walk out of the room.
CHAPTER TWO
I
FOLD
up Helen’s engagement notice from the newspaper and tuck it in my vanity drawer. I don’t think she and Dickie are in love. Not the kind of love you should be in if you’re going to stand in front of God and everyone else and declare your devotion for all eternity. If you ask me (which no one does, because all anyone ever talks about is Helen now that the wedding is two weeks away), my sister hasn’t even been thinking about love or Dickie or what will happen the day after the wedding. All she cares about is the ceremony and her dress and the flowers and what will be served at the luncheon afterwards. But this is my sister’s specialty—controlling the things she can touch and see and smell.
“There’s nothing wrong with those shoes, Joyce,” she said to me the other night. “They’re a perfectly good height.”
“I got a nosebleed the last time I put them on.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
You’d think a maid of honour would have more influence, but she sees me only as her younger, inexperienced sister. Any suggestions I’ve made or concerns I’ve had have been batted away like fruit flies over a ripe banana. Of course the heels aren’t too high, Joyce. No, your dress isn’t too tight in the bust. The colour is perfect for your complexion. And I’m sorry that you have to be paired up with Dickie’s cousin, but he’s not
that
overweight and everyone will be on high alert to ensure he doesn’t drink too much.
Last night, at the dinner table, I listened to my mother and sister go on about the hat for Helen’s honeymoon dress (she and Dickie are boarding a train to Montreal after the reception), and as I passed the plate of Saltines to Dickie, I noticed he looked shell-shocked. Not that Dickie ever looks anything
but
shell-shocked (Helen says he has bad nerves, nothing serious), but he seems even more so lately. His eyes searched for something to land on.