I mount the front steps, avoiding the faces of the people I pass. Someone says “Good afternoon” but I pretend not to hear. I pass the nurses’ station. More residents line the halls, and I think of garbage cans on curbs, waiting for pickup. My heart is a fist. Vomit rises in my throat again and I swallow it down.
Up the stairs. Up to the second floor where she lives. The woman in the shoe who had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. As my feet take the steps, I notice the carpeting for the first time. It’s thick and dusty white. I should’ve replaced the carpet in my house. It’s all buckled now. Ridges so high I trip on them if I’m not careful. Whoever buys my house will no doubt tear it all up to reveal the hardwood beneath. I bet it’s a young couple. Perhaps they have a child. A son. I’ll leave a note for them on the kitchen counter.
Hold tight to everything
.
Mrs. Pender’s door is partly shut. The paper acorn dangles. It’s moments away from falling. I push open the door.
She’s sitting beside her bed, wearing that cranberry cardigan. She looks up at me and in the flash of the moment, she looks happy to see me. Her face widens. Wrinkles soften. Her mouth falls open, about to speak.
“Whuh, whuh, whuh-whuh.” Mrs. Ogilvy waves from her bed. I nod in her direction, but I can’t take my eyes off Mrs. Pender. I don’t move from the doorway.
“I’m glad you’re here. I found that book.” Mrs. Pender points towards her dresser.
“You’ve lied,” I say, my voice flat. “All this time, you’ve done nothing but lie.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I take a step into the room. “Freddy never killed himself. He never jumped off a ship. You made it all up.”
She’s quiet for a second, but when she speaks, her voice is a screech. “Don’t you come in here talking like that!”
“All these years, your son was alive.”
“I’m going to call the nurse if you keep this up.”
“You’re a sick woman.”
“Mrs. Ogilvy, pull the cord.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Pull the cord!”
“There’s no need for that, Cruella.”
I turn around to see Walter standing in the doorway, his forehead glistening and chest heaving. He wags a finger at me. “You, my dear, owe me three dollars and forty-four cents. Plus gas.”
“How did you know where to find me?” I ask.
“Women’s intuition,” he says.
“I told you I didn’t want you back here!” Mrs. Pender yells at him. “I’ve got no more business with you.”
“Is that any way to talk to your favourite son-in-law?” He steps into the room. “Perhaps Mrs. Ogilvy might appreciate that new cardigan more than you do.”
“Whuh.”
“You’ve got no right to follow me,” I tell him. I open my purse and begin fumbling for my wallet. “If it’s the money you want, I’ll give it to you. Then you need to be on your way.”
“I’m not here for money, Joyce. I’m here because you looked like death warmed over at the café. You were as white as a sheet when you walked out. I was worried. This must be very troubling for you.”
“Troubling?” I laugh at the absurdity of his words. “I’m not troubled.
She’s
troubled.” I point at Mrs. Pender.
“I’m troubled by many things,” Mrs. Pender says. “Laziness. Greed. The shirt he’s wearing.”
“Fred always said you’d have to pay the piper one day,” Walter replies, stepping towards her.
“I’ve been paying the piper for ninety-seven years now.” She turns her head. “Mrs. Ogilvy, pull that cord!”
Something explodes inside of me, sending tremors through my bones, blurring my vision. I march over to Mrs. Pender. “I sat here and listened to your misery. I pitied you because you had no one, because you’d lost a son. But you had him all along. What kind of a mother would lie about the death of her own child?”
“I know about you, Joyce,” she says quietly. “Word gets around in a place like Balsden. Nothing stays a secret very long. You had a son, too.”
“Don’t you dare bring John into this!”
“He lived in Toronto, didn’t he? I remember hearing he was a chef at a fancy restaurant. Never married. No children. An early death. I read the notice in the paper.”
“Be quiet!”
“No cause of death given, from what I remember.”
“He had cancer!”
“Joyce—”
Something sounds in the distance. An electronic pulse. Mrs. Ogilvy has pulled the buzzer. I feel a hand on my arm and yank it away. “Don’t touch me. Don’t anyone touch me!”
The buzzer bleats.
“Perhaps we had things in common,” Mrs. Pender says, her mouth a crooked slash. “Things we never talked about. Mother to mother.”
“I have nothing in common with you!”
“Is everything all right in here?”
I glance over my shoulder and see a woman in a uniform.
“Everything’s fine,” Walter says. “I think.”
And before another word is said, I rush out of the room.
Rushing. Rushing. Panic always rising inside me. I had to keep watch over my son. I couldn’t let him get away. Couldn’t let him escape again. The words of that kindergarten teacher had haunted me:
Keep a close eye on him
.
So long as John lived in my house, within my walls, he’d be safe.
And for a time, things were fine again. He came and went to school. He got a part-time job working as a stock boy at Dove’s Grocers. I’d wait for him in the parking lot at the end of his shifts and watch him walking towards the car, tugging at the black bow tie around his collar. He was getting older. Taller. There were bristles on his chin. He was becoming a man.
“Everything will turn out,” I promised myself and him. John was a good boy. He’d find a nice girl to settle down with. They’d have children. Charlie and I would go over there on Sunday afternoons for dinner. I’d tell John’s wife stories about when he was younger. She’d look lovingly in his direction, wondering how she ever landed someone as special as him. And I’d laugh in such a carefree way as I passed the mashed potatoes or played hide-and-seek with the grandkids. I’d been so silly. There hadn’t been a thing to worry about. It had all worked out in the end.
A few months before he graduated from high school, John told Charlie and me he was planning to go to college. “For chef training,” he said.
“When did this all come about?” I’d been holding on to the hope that he might go to teachers’ college. It would be a safe and respectable career.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I could make good money, although I’d be working mostly evenings and weekends.”
“Sounds good to me,” Charlie said.
“I didn’t know they had a chef course at Balsden College,” I said.
“They don’t. But the college in Andover has one. I could get a diploma in two years’ time. Mark is planning to go there too, for engineering. We’ve talked about sharing an apartment.”
“Mark?” I asked, casting a sideways glance in Charlie’s direction. My sister’s revelation had been burned into my mind. Neither of us had mentioned it again. But something was different between us. There was a noticeable shift. I resented her for observing something that I’d worked so hard to keep secret. I hated her suspicions about John. At times, I’d catch her looking over at him, her verdict written all over her face. It galled me. Her children weren’t perfect. It wasn’t as though she was living some charmed life.
But if Mark was really that uncomfortable around John, as Helen had claimed, why would he agree to share a place with him? And why would Helen agree to let the two of them live together? Still, I didn’t like the idea of John being so far away.
“It’s a forty-minute drive,” Charlie said later that evening. “We’ll see him once a week.”
“Andover is a much bigger city than Balsden,” I said.
“My work would give him a scholarship,” Charlie said, completely bypassing my worries. He looked genuinely excited. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him like this. “His grades are good enough. I’ll talk to the administration person tomorrow.”
“The boys have their differences,” Helen said the next day. I noticed an edge of caution in her voice. “But they’re family. Besides, I feel better about Mark staying with John rather than a bunch of strangers. Don’t you?”
Yes, I did. But the only way I could control things was if John went to the college here and lived at home. The moment he was on his own, away from me, bad things would happen. He needed to be monitored.
“You have to let them go sometime,” Helen said. “God help us mothers.”
When late summer rolled around, we packed up the car and moved John to his new apartment. I was silent on the drive, my thoughts heavy. Mark, Helen and Dickie were at the apartment when we arrived. Helen had sewn curtains for the kitchen, and both of us packed the boys’ freezer with foil-wrapped dinners. Dickie looked ragged, a hollowed-out souvenir of his younger self. I don’t know how Helen had managed throughout the years. He made a joke about the number of women who’d be coming through the front door and we all laughed. Helen playfully hit him in the arm with a tea towel.
“These boys need to keep their priorities straight,” she said, pointing her finger at John and Mark. “School, school, school. No girls. There will be plenty of time for that once you graduate.”
I glanced at John and he looked away.
Charlie and I drove home in silence. As we turned onto our street, he reached over and took my hand. “He’ll be fine, Joyce.”
I said nothing.
“My son is a college student.” He shook his head, a half-believing grin on his face. Charlie had only gone as far as grade eight. I realized that underneath my layers of worry, I was proud of John, too. My son was going further than his father and I ever had. Still, I couldn’t shake the dark thoughts that hovered above my head in the weeks that followed. I would take precautions.
“I don’t want you spying, of course,” I told Mark a few weeks later. “It’s not that I don’t trust him. I do. But John can be too nice for his own good. Gullible. There’s a chance he could fall in with the wrong crowd.”
“I don’t see much chance of that happening,” Mark said. “He hardly ever goes out.”
“He’s shy,” I said. “Just keep an eye on your cousin, Mark. If you see anything that alarms you—anything at all—let me know.”
“Aunt Joyce, are you talking about drugs?”
“No,” I said. “Not drugs.” I bit my lips as I mapped out my next words. “You’re a good nephew, Mark. I’m glad you’re with John. It makes me feel better. But I need your help.
John
needs your help, even if he doesn’t know it. If you see anything that doesn’t seem normal, you let me know right away, all right? You need to call me, Mark.”
“I will,” he said. “But to be honest, John’s always been a little weird.”
I lightened my tone. “Do you have a girlfriend, Mark?”
“A what?”
“A girlfriend. Someone you go out with.”
“Not really.”
“If you do meet someone, she might have a friend. Then you and John could go on double dates together. That would be fun, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose,” he said, but the words came out sounding like a question.
I usually spoke to John twice during the week and on Sundays. We’d talk about his classes and how they were going and if Mark was getting under his skin and if he was eating well.
“I’m fine,” he’d say. “Everything is fine.”
Fine
. A four-letter word. I hated hearing it because it told me nothing. I’d ramble on about the mundane details of my life: what we’d eaten for supper the previous night, who I ran into at the grocery store, the colour I was thinking of painting the living room. Looking back, I think I believed that so long as I kept talking, nothing would go wrong. There wasn’t enough space between my words for problems. How he must’ve hated those phone calls.
“Have you met any friends?”
“A couple of people in class. I don’t really have time to socialize much. The workload is heavy. More than I imagined it would be.”
He came home for Thanksgiving with a sack of dirty laundry over his shoulder and hair that hung over his forehead. He’d lost weight and looked tired. When I mentioned it to him, he said I was overreacting. I piled his plate up with mashed potatoes and gave him an extra dollop of Dream Whip on his pumpkin pie. He ate everything and raided my pantry for canned goods that he rammed into his laundry sack amongst the jeans and shirts I’d washed, ironed and folded so neatly. And then he went back to a life I knew nothing about.
——
After leaving the Golden Sunset, I drive in circles around Balsden, turning down streets I’ve known my entire life. I pass the house where Helen and I grew up. I stop in front of my old high school, the church where Charlie and I got married. The hospital where John was born. Then I pull over on some no-name side street, lean my head against the steering wheel and cry.
I drive to the grocery store, anger building in me now. How could Mrs. Pender have lied like that? I leave my sunglasses on to hide my red eyes and accidentally bring down a display of toilet paper at the end of an aisle.
“I’m sorry,” I say to the stock clerk and hurry away. I find daisies in the florist section. The white petals and mustard-coloured buttons call to me. I need their simplicity.
The flowers are sitting next to me on the passenger seat, wrapped in brown paper. They won’t last more than a day or two, but I don’t care. I usually buy artificial roses in the summer, but not now. This time, I want something real.
I’ve seen other women, tending after graves the way you would a house. They water the grass. Plant flowers. Decorate the tombstones with trinkets and candles. I used to watch them as I sat on the bench next to the plot that John and Charlie now share.
“What comfort can a slab of stone give you?” I wanted to ask those women.
I don’t come to the cemetery very often anymore. Not like I used to. But I make a point of changing the flowers in the stone vase every season. Neither John nor Charlie cared much for flowers, so I don’t spend too much time fussing over which ones to get. Poinsettias in winter, tulips in spring, roses in the summer, tiger lilies in the fall. It makes me feel better knowing the flowers are here. Perhaps a stranger walking past the tombstone will notice them and know that the people resting here were loved. The last time I came here was the end of May. I brought a bouquet of roses with plastic dew-drops on their petals to replace the purple tulips that I’d placed here in March. Since my son’s death, spring has always been the hardest season. New beginnings abound. But not for all. Some hearts will always be stuck in winter.