John answered when I rang the buzzer. “Uh-oh. Looks like the good times are over now.” He said the door to his apartment was open.
He was lying on the couch, a blue blanket covering the peaks of his thin frame. Knees. Elbows. Toes. When he met my gaze, my worst fears were confirmed. He looked away. He knew that I knew. His expression took me back to a cold field on a March day and a burning question from many years before.
Why did you come?
He said he’d been running a fever since the morning. I wanted to take him back to the hospital. “There’s no need,” he said. “It will break. They always do.”
I ran a washcloth under the kitchen tap, squeezed it out. The kitchen was a mess. Plants wilted on the sills. Sweatshirts lay on the floor like puddles. I’d have to clean everything once I got settled. I pressed the washcloth against his forehead, covering the top half of his face. I could see only a scrap of nose and a pair of lips sticking out from the scruff around his face.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were sick?” I asked, more angry than concerned.
“I did.”
“Not sick like this.”
He propped himself up on his elbow and lifted the washcloth slightly. I saw a flash of eyes. “I can’t be sick for much longer because I’ve booked a trip to Mexico.”
“Mexico? Why on earth would you want to go there?”
“I’d let you come with me, if you thought you’d survive outside your ten-mile radius around Balsden.”
“Don’t be smart. I’ve been lots of places. I certainly don’t need to add Mexico to the list. Besides, there’s nothing in the world that you can’t find in your own backyard.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, that’s so.”
“Well, I’d still like to go to Mexico. And I think you’d enjoy yourself, too. You could put on a bikini and do tequila shots on the beach.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
He’d lost his job. He told me that the second day I was there. The manager had pulled him aside and said that some of the staff were concerned. It wasn’t appropriate for him to be handling food. The members were nervous.
“They can’t fire someone over the flu,” I shot back. “Did you talk to Angela’s husband about this?”
“I’m not getting him involved. I was getting tired of that place anyway. There are few things in life more demeaning than catering to the wealthy. They gave me three months’ salary, which will do me for the time being. I’d like to find a place where I could really cut loose. Express my creativity. Someplace that doesn’t serve lobster beak.”
He smiled and I know I should’ve smiled back. But I couldn’t. I went to the bathroom to get the thermometer from the medicine cabinet.
“If you’re out of work, there’s no way you’re going on vacation,” I called. “You’ll just have to wait. Why all this sudden talk about Mexico, anyway? What’s there that you can’t get here?”
“Warmth,” he called back, and I nearly crumpled. It was the end of June.
He had friends. They’d call in the evenings and John would excuse himself to his bedroom to talk. I listened at his door a few times, trying to pick up some of the conversation. Who were these people? What was he telling them that he wasn’t telling me? But I could never make out specific words, only his quiet tone, slipping out from under the door.
After I’d been with him for a week I still didn’t know what to think. He was sick. There was no doubt about that. But he was still able to get around. He wasn’t incapacitated. We even went for a walk one day. I couldn’t believe how expensive the houses were when John told me. It was ridiculous. They weren’t much bigger than our place in Balsden.
“There’s no way you can live here,” I said. “How will you ever afford it?”
“I get by okay,” he said as we started up the driveway in front of the apartment building. “I’ll make it. Don’t you worry.”
Worry!
How could I not? I heard him in the bathroom at night, wincing at some of the sounds. And yet, in the morning, he’d be all action, refusing to sit still. He needed to be out, he said. Doing things. My presence made him feel restless.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about my presence for much longer,” I said. I needed to get home to take care of a few things. I’d be gone a few days. Then I’d be back.
“Do you have someone?” I asked him the morning I left.
He looked up from his bowl of cereal, startled. “Someone?”
“You know what I mean. When I leave, is there someone to take care of you?” I waited. Would he mention this Marty? It felt like a dare.
“Yes. I have friends, Mom.”
“Are any of them sick as well?”
“Some.” He slipped a spoonful of cornflakes in his mouth. A teardrop of milk lodged in his beard. This has stuck with me over the years, this memory of milk in my son’s dark beard.
“Come home with me.”
This is what I should’ve said. If I had been a good mother, I would’ve insisted that he pack a bag and come back with me to Balsden. His father and I would’ve taken care of him. I’d have cooked his favourite meals. We’d just got a VCR and could watch old movies in the afternoons. Perhaps that
Virginia
movie he loved so much. We’d tour around Balsden. I’d show him what was new. He’d go back in a few weeks, find another job. We’d make plans for Mexico.
Come home, John. Come home
.
But I couldn’t bear the thought of people seeing him like this. They’d suspect more than the flu. Conclusions would be drawn. They’d think things that weren’t true. Judge my son. Judge me. Charlie. I couldn’t have that. He was better off in Toronto, with his friends, in his own apartment. Tucked away in a big, anonymous city.
So I didn’t say the words. Instead, I looked past his shoulder and commented on how pretty the sky was that morning.
“Like a painting,” I said.
He turned around slowly and said, “Ocean blue.”
He offered to come with me to the station.
“I’m not crippled, you know,” he said. “It might do me some good to get outside.”
I refused and told him I’d call when I got home. “I’ll be back in a few days.” I looked down at the hallway tiles. “Your father will want to know how you’re doing. He’ll likely want to come back with me. I know he doesn’t say it, but he loves you a great deal, John. What do you want me to tell him?”
“Nothing.”
“I have to tell him something. He’s your father.”
“Then tell him I’m sick but I’m on the mend. Promise me you won’t say anything more than that.”
“I can’t—”
He grabbed my arm. “Please promise me. He’s … Dad’s been good to me. I can’t do this to him. He can’t know.”
Another secret. Another wound.
“All right, John. All right.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said.
“But you’re all alone.”
“No.” His voice turned angry. “You not being here does not make me alone. Do you understand that?”
“But I never meet anyone, John. I hear them call but no one ever drops by.”
“You have no interest in meeting any of them, Mother. So stop pretending otherwise.”
Mother
. We were back to that. The ocean had receded.
I downplayed things to Charlie as John had asked. I told him that John had a bug but it didn’t seem serious. In telling him this, I could partially believe my own words.
“What kind of a bug?” Charlie asked. We were sitting at the kitchen table. I’d made my cabbage roll casserole. It was Charlie’s favourite, but I hated the way the smell hung in the air for hours afterwards.
“A flu bug,” I said, pushing around the remains on my plate. “He’s lost some weight and his energy is down, but he thinks he’s on the mend.”
“Has he seen the doctor?”
“Yes. He’s on some kind of prescription. Don’t ask me to repeat the name. I won’t get it right.”
A sharp inhale. A holding. Then a slow exhale. “I see.”
“He had to leave work,” I said. “They gave him three months’ severance, which I think is reasonable. He said he was ready for a change.”
Charlie looked up, weighing this new piece of information. He opened his mouth. Then closed it. His eyes slowly circled the room, looking for something.
“His spirits are good,” I said quickly. “You know John. Can’t sit still. He wants to go to Mexico when he gets better.”
“He shouldn’t be alone.”
“He’s not.”
Charlie’s eyebrows inched upwards. “That friend he came here with?”
“Of course not. Angela from high school. Do you remember her? There are others, too. They call to check up on him. He has a life there.”
Charlie reached for his napkin and slowly wiped his mouth. His voice shook ever so slightly. “He should come home.”
“I asked him to, but he wants to stay where he is. It’s where he’s most comfortable. I’ll be going back in a week.”
He put his napkin down. His eyes met mine. “I’m coming with you.”
“You can’t. You’re working.”
“I’ll take vacation time.”
“Don’t be foolish, Charlie. It’s not necessary. He’s fine. Really.”
“My son is sick. I want to see him. End of discussion.”
I called John twice a day. Sometimes, the phone would ring through to his answering machine and I’d leave a panicked message, telling him to call me as soon as he got in. What if he’d fallen or was too sick to answer? Once, he didn’t call me back for seven hours. I was beside myself and was about to tell Charlie we were driving to Toronto that night when the phone rang.
“Where have you been?” I cried.
Out. With friends. To dinner and then a movie. “You need to stop this, Mom. You’re driving me crazy. I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re not fine and you know it.”
“Don’t tell me what I know.”
I sensed Charlie hovering around the corner. I lowered my voice.
“You can’t blame me for being worried, John.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if there was something to worry about. I’ve been better these past few days. Tonight was the first time I’ve gone out in weeks. I was in a great mood. And then I come home to this.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just … when you don’t answer, I start thinking things.”
“Well, don’t think.”
He told me there was no need for me to come back to Toronto. He’d call if anything came up. “I’m fine. Scout’s honour.”
I’m not sure if I believed him or if I just
wanted
to believe him. Perhaps both. He agreed to Charlie and me coming down for a day within the next couple of weeks. He said he’d take us out for dinner at his favourite restaurant.
“Nothing too fancy,” I said. “You know how we are.”
“All too well,” he said.
I cut my calls back to once a day, scrounging every ounce of self-control not to pick up that phone more than once some nights. Other times, Charlie called him, although he’d never tell me. He seemed to want to keep those conversations a secret.
“Are you taking vitamins?” I heard him ask once as I was coming through the back door. “Someone at work told me you should take them with your dinner. Not in the morning. They don’t get into your system the same way. I’ll send you some … No, it’s fine. No trouble.”
He went to the drugstore that night and bought two packages of multivitamins. I watched as he sat at the kitchen table and carefully wrapped them both in brown paper. He addressed the package in small capital letters, the way he wrote everything. The next morning, he was at the post office as soon as it opened.
“He’ll be fine,” I told Charlie when he got back, the irony of our role reversal not lost on either of us. “Everything is fine.”
Until one day, it wasn’t. Two weeks after my stay in Toronto, I got a call one afternoon from a man who introduced himself as Marty. I froze. He told me that John wasn’t well. He’d been taken to the hospital a few hours before.
“He’s been running a fever for the past week,” the man said.
“But I was speaking with him the other night. He didn’t say anything.”
“There’s a lot John doesn’t tell you.”
I hung up without saying goodbye.
There’s no time to think. No time for me to get trapped in my head again, caught in endless memories. Only meatballs. I squish the cold ground beef between my fingers. It leaves a pinkish residue on my hands. I worry that Walter won’t like them. He’s probably used to finer cuisine than this and I’m reminded of John again and all the dishes he never got to make. The year after he died, I bought a gourmet cookbook. There was a recipe in it that was similar to the stuffed chicken breasts he made for Charlie and me that time. I was desperate to recreate them. I don’t know why. I bought all the ingredients and pounded my chicken breasts until they were paper-thin but when it came time to roll them up, my fingers fumbled and the filling kept falling out. I ended up sticking a dozen toothpicks in each one to hold it in place.
“These look like sea creatures,” Charlie said when I handed him his plate. I couldn’t stop crying after that, even though he kept apologizing.
Once I place all the meatballs in a serving dish, I pour two cans of tomato soup over them and put them in the fridge to set overnight. Then I look around my house, wondering how I’m going to manage everything. I’ll have to clean and dust and wash dishes I haven’t touched in years. Do I even have napkins?
“I’ve got a package somewhere,” Fern says when I call her. “They might have poinsettias on them, though.”
“That’s fine,” I say. “Anything is better than paper towels.”
“You didn’t invite Mrs. Pender, did you?”
“No. I suppose I should. But I can’t bring myself to do it, Fern. Every time I think of what she did, it makes my blood boil.”
“I’m not going to tell you what to do. God knows you have your reasons for not inviting her. It’s just that … he was her son, Joyce.”
“I’m not sure she can even leave the home,” I say. “She’s in a wheelchair.”
“There’s your escape route. She can’t come into your home if you don’t have one of those ramps. Maybe you and Walter could drop by afterwards with leftovers. Make her feel like you haven’t forgotten her.”
I glance at the clock. It’s just before nine. She’s likely in bed, which means there’s a good chance she won’t answer the phone. I hang up with Fern and flip through my address book until I find Mrs. Pender’s number. I’ll give her four rings and then I’ll—