Natural Order (8 page)

“It’s you, Joyce Conrad.” She sounds bothered, as if I promised to come earlier.

“I made these,” I say, holding out the tin. “Date squares.”

“You didn’t have to.” She takes the tin from me. I wait for her to invite me inside. Somewhere, a wind chime tinkles on a nearby porch.

“I just can’t believe it,” I say. “I can’t believe Freddy’s gone.” A lump catches in my throat.

“Freddy was many things, but predictable wasn’t one of them.”

“Do you know how it happened?”

“He got himself mixed up with a bad crowd in Hollywood. Showbiz types. Old men. They influenced him. They used him, Joyce. A bunch of filthy men took my son and squeezed his soul dry. He called me one night, crying. Said he couldn’t live with himself. He was ashamed. I remember his words to me. He said, ‘Mother, I feel diseased.’ That was his word.
Diseased
. Do you know what it does to a mother to hear her own child say that? I told him to come home right away. He could get a job in Balsden. There was no shame in it. But he refused. He said he couldn’t come back here a failure. The next time I heard from him, he’d taken a job on a cruise ship. He was looking forward to seeing the Atlantic.”

She clears her throat and stares at a point just over my shoulder. “So he went out to sea. One night, he was on the deck and went overboard.”

“No one went in after him?”

“I’m not sure anyone noticed. Until it was too late, of course. The current would have pulled him under very quickly. He wasn’t a strong swimmer, my boy.”

“You don’t think he …” The words slip out before I consider what I’m saying.

Mrs. Pender looks at me. She says, “You knew about Freddy, didn’t you?”

“Knew what?”

“His … predilection.”

“I’m sorry?”

“His
way
, Joyce. Those men saw it. They used my sweet boy and then tossed him aside. They might as well have pushed him over the rails themselves.”

A drop of sweat rolls down my back. I’m not sure what to say, so I keep my lips pressed together. I think of white suits and hard smiles. Pompoms and the cha-cha.

“A mother always knows when something isn’t right with her son,” Mrs. Pender says. “It’s her job to protect him, especially when he doesn’t have the wherewithal to protect himself.” She looks down at the tin. I hear her inhale deeply. When she speaks again, her voice is thicker. I think it’s the first time I’ve heard her real voice. “I failed my boy. And, in the way these sorts of things tend to go, he failed me. I’m just not sure which of us failed the other first. But I have the rest of my life to figure that out.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I say.

But I do.

That night, I take John into the living room.

“Listen to me,” I say, holding him by the shoulders. “I’m signing you up for baseball. We’ll go to the store tomorrow and get you a baseball glove and a hat.”

“I don’t want to play ball!”

“Your father can practise with you in the backyard. You should be spending more time with him and not with me.”

“No!”

“I’m not arguing with you, John. You’re playing ball this summer whether you want to or not.”

He squirms under my grip.
Please don’t start to cry
, I think.
Please
.

“You’ll make lots of friends. You’ll make your father happy. You’ll make me happy, too. Don’t you want to make us happy?”

“No!” he screams.

My hands are vises on his tiny shoulders.

“I bought you that doll,” I say.

He stops. I see the hurt in his eyes. Then the anger. Then resolution. My son and I have reached a new level of understanding.

A few days later, the construction crews move into the neighbourhood. By noon on the first day, half the trees behind our house are gone. Hal drops by and we sit out back, drinking coffee, listening to the chainsaws. And although I know I won’t see it again, I can’t stop myself from looking for the deer.

My roommate Ruth is dead. I’m certain of it.

She came down with a dry cough a week ago that turned into a gurgling hacking. I wasn’t able to sleep with the racket, especially when they brought in that hissing oxygen machine with its see-through green plastic mask and coiling hose. I felt like I was sleeping across the room from an alien. My nerves were raw. I resented having to put up with this commotion. How did I know she wasn’t contagious? I’d had a tickle in my throat for two days but no one paid me any attention.

“Try sucking on a peppermint,” the Filipina nurse suggested.

“You should’ve been a brain surgeon,” I said.

I sat in my wheelchair and watched Ruth trying to pull air down into her lungs. She’d open her eyes from time to time and I could tell she was disoriented. I’d wheel over and wrap my hand around the cool metal bedrail.

“YOUR NAME IS RUTH SCHUELLER,” I’d yell over the hissing machine. “YOU LIVE AT CHESTNUT PARK IN BALSDEN. YOU ARE SICK.”

She’d blink back at me, her mouth opening and closing under her mask. Was she trying to tell me something? Sometimes she’d try to take the mask off, but I’d clamp my hand over it, holding it firmly in place.

“IF YOU TAKE THE MASK OFF, YOU WILL DIE.”

I wasn’t sure how true that was, but figured the strong-arm approach was the best one to take.

Other times, her eyes would meet mine and I’d see her fear, pure as the white in her hair. My hand would move from the bedrail to her forearm. Her skin was loose sand beneath my palm.

“YOU’RE IN GOOD HANDS.”

I don’t think either one of us believed that one.

After dinner the other night, two orderlies marched into the room with a stretcher.

“You are being taken to the hospital,” one of them told Ruth in a robotic voice. “Your doctor has been notified.”

I watched as they lifted her from her bed, her tiny purple-spotted feet dangling.

“Which hospital?” I asked.

“We’re not allowed to say, ma’am,” one of the orderlies said as he draped a blanket over Ruth. “Patient confidentiality.”

“What if her family calls?” I knew this wouldn’t happen. Ruth’s phone had yet to ring once in the year we’d been sharing a room. But still. It was a matter of principle. I was her roommate, after all.

“The family can call the nurses’ station, ma’am.”

I watched them wheel Ruth out. I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye. They took the oxygen machine with them. The room was suddenly silent. I stared at the wrinkled sheets of her empty bed, the indent on her pillow. The walls around me seemed to nudge closer. I wheeled myself into the tight space between the wall and my bed and traced the crooked veins of my hands.

“I-23! I-23!”

I massage my temples.

“G-49! G-49!”

Bingo Friday. The recreation room is next door to mine. The racket wouldn’t be so bad if Hilda didn’t use that damn microphone to call the numbers. There’s no escaping it. I turn up the volume on my TV, but it’s no use. I can’t concentrate. The only thing I can do is hope someone gets lucky soon. These games can go on for hours.

I’m supposed to go for my shower this morning and I’m not looking forward to it. They hose you down like a farm animal and the chemicals in the cheap soap turn my skin to crackled mud. They don’t even take the time to blow-dry my hair. No wonder Ruth came down with pneumonia. That’s what one of the nurses told me yesterday. I think her name is Mary. Or Marjorie.

“Apparently, she’s had it for some time,” she said under her breath. “It’s lucky they caught it in time.”

“She’ll pull through?” I asked, incredulous. I almost felt myself rise out of my wheelchair.

“I suspect so,” Mary/Marjorie said. “If all goes well, she’ll be back in a week.”

“N-35! N-35!”

“For god’s sake,” I mutter as I press the volume button on my remote control. “Somebody win already.”

There isn’t much television worth watching at this time of the day, but I settle for my soap opera, even though I don’t have a clue what’s going on most of the time. The dialogue is so fast and I can’t remember who did what to whom or which twin sister ran off with the other one’s husband or who robbed the bank to pay for the kidney transplant. So much life packed into a single hour. I wheel myself closer to the set, squinting at the screen. Two young men are talking in an office. One of them is wearing a tie and seems agitated. Now who are they? I wonder.

The other man is wearing one of those hats. What do they call them again? Visors. He looks like he’s just come in from the tennis court. He grabs the arm of the man in the suit.

“B-5! B-5!”

I reach for the ginger ale sitting beside the TV. It’ll be warm and flat by now, just the way I like it. Just as my fingers touch the plastic ridges of the glass, the two men step towards one another and kiss.

“O-73! O-73!”

My fingers stop. Have I got my channels mixed up? Is this one of those hidden camera shows? I wait for studio-audience laughter, but nothing comes other than the sweeping strains of an orchestra. This doesn’t appear to be a joke. But surely it must be. It’s the middle of the afternoon.

“Ready for your shower, Mrs. Sparks?”

A hand touches my shoulder, startling me. I turn my head and see it’s one of the nurses, the fat one with the bright red hair and orange streaks. When did women decide it was attractive to have fire on their heads?

“Now what is going on here?” she asks, bending towards the TV.

Shame sweeps over me. I fumble for the remote control. “I don’t know what this is. I turned on the TV and this came on.”

“The one in the suit is a real looker,” the nurse says. “Just look at those two go at it. There’s nothing they won’t put on TV these days.”

“Take me to the showers,” I say, louder than necessary. We’re halfway down the hall when I hear a “Bingo!” but the victory comes too late.

“Let me know if the water’s too cold.”

A cool shower on my calf. Lilac soap. A drain in the floor like an armoured mouth.

I keep my head down while the water spills over me. I won’t come clean. Firewoman can ram the shower head down my throat, but this guilt will never wash away. It’s impenetrable. A stain under a crust of ice.

“Can you lift your arm for me, Mrs. Sparks?”

My tears, at least, go undetected.

“Mrs. Sparks?”

My eyes open. I lift my head. The back of my neck throbs.

It’s him. Standing in the doorway, a cautious expression on his face. He’s wearing a yellow sweater this time. It looks soft and I imagine how nice it would be to have his arms around me, taking me in. I don’t remember the last time I was hugged.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Timothy says. “But Maureen in 407 is worried about Ruth. She asked if I’d check with you.”

“Pneumonia,” I say. “They say she had it for quite some time. God knows who has what around this place. How is Maureen doing herself? I haven’t seen her in the dining room for the past couple of days.”

“She’s been having dizzy spells,” he says. “She fell out of bed a few days ago. Her arm is all bruised.” He takes a step back. “Thanks for the information about Ruth. I’ll pass it along. Sorry to have bothered you.” He turns to go.

“I’ve always been a private person, you see.”

He pauses. Turns back. Takes one step into the room. My eyes dart down.

“I gathered that.”

“That photo you commented on,” I say. “It was taken the day my son graduated from chef school.”

He walks over to it, picks it up. My heart quickens. “I can see the resemblance,” he says.

“We had the same nose.”

I watch him sit down in the chair opposite me and stare at John’s picture.

“He was a good cook. I couldn’t boil an egg to save my life. My husband wasn’t much good in the kitchen, either. I don’t know where John got his talent. Strange, isn’t it? How people can be so different, even in families.”

I never knew my son. Not in the way I should have known him.

“He made a big birthday cake for me once. An apple cake, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. And writing on the top. ‘Happy Birthday, Mom’ in white icing. I’d never seen anything so—”

I press my eyes shut to block the tears. I won’t cry.

“That’s all in the past now. No point bringing it up.”

Timothy looks from the picture back at me. I feel as though my clothes are suddenly made of Saran Wrap.

“He was thirty-one,” I say. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”

CHAPTER FOUR

A
NOTHER DAY
, another funeral. This one for Louise Arnold. According to Fern, she’d been dead a few days before she was found face down in her laundry room, the spilled contents of her laundry basket around her.

“Can you imagine?” Fern said, looking like she’d just sucked a lemon wedge.

“Who found her?”

“Her neighbour. Apparently, Louise’s son was trying to get in touch with her. He lives in Andover, you know. Anyway, he called and called and never got an answer. The neighbour had a key and went in. I can’t imagine. If I ever don’t answer the phone, Joyce, call the police. For god’s sake, don’t come into my house.”

I made date squares yesterday for the after-service luncheon. I’m nervous about them, even though they look more or less like I remember them. I tasted a few oats off the top. The possibility of food poisoning worries me. I hear about these things on the news sometimes. Bake sales that lead to manslaughter charges. One bad egg and your entire life is over.