Authors: Joan Thomas
Maggie’s smile vanishes. “Lies,” she says softly. Her face opens in sympathy, as if Liz’s outrage is a plea for her help. And Liz recalls with fluorescent clarity that Mary Magdalene will always keep you smaller than she is. It’s futile to confront her – it will never register. There’s no anger in her world; there’s only need, your need for her. “I know this must be terribly upsetting for you,” Maggie is saying.
“And I want to assure you, it’s not something I did lightly. I’m just thinking of that tiny baby. That’s all it is. I’m thinking of the sort of home a baby needs, the order and routines, a family where children are at the centre.” She launches into a soft-voiced inventory of her concerns, starting with the diaper rash the foster mother discovered and leaping back to some supposed incident fifteen years ago, the distress she felt when she found little Sylvie three blocks away from home in her pyjamas.
Liz stands on the sidewalk outside Maggie’s house, hearing the screams and laughter of little girls in the next yard, and notes the wrinkles running down from the corners of Maggie’s mouth and the way her jawline is softening. She hears the righteousness in her voice and she taps into an old and nourishing hatred, like an underground spring, for middle-aged women – the whole cohort of them, the way they twist and knead and pummel and bully life into what they want it to be.
Maggie’s moved on to her anguish about the baby being in foster care. “I’m sure you feel the same way,” she says and then her words come out in a rush: “You’re going to hear it sooner or later, Liz, so I may as well tell you. I’ve offered to take the baby myself. Just for now. I was in the office again today – I just came from there – to see whether they might consider releasing her to her father’s custody. With our support, of course. We’d all pitch in to make a home for that little girl here.” With her soft eyes she includes Krzysztof in this touching scenario, and an old impetuousness steps up to Liz like an ally in her time of need – it’s there, shining in the street – wreckage and chaos and all its audacious satisfactions. Except that something else has lit up inside her, a loyalty to something she can’t name, closer to her heart. She turns impatiently and interrupts.
“Does Noah want this baby?” she asks. She looks at the elm
trees queuing along the street, diminishing like in a perspective drawing. She flicks her car key open and presses the remote to prompt a faithful blink of her headlights. “Has your son ever shown a single sign of interest in his daughter?”
T
hey’re in a different kind of waiting now. Liz is desperate to broadcast Maggie’s treachery, equally desperate to keep the story quiet. Evenings, she paces the house, ranting. Aiden takes his drink out to the deck and tries to think his way through the thing. He can picture Maggie in the child welfare office, her face radiant with sorrow and resolve as she delivers the infamous list, and he feels some eagerness to see it, to see what light it casts on their whole domestic enterprise. But why didn’t she just drop over to the house and talk to them?
Sylvie can’t be persuaded to go to the Fringe play and Liz won’t leave Sylvie, so he goes on his own. The venue is a narrow warehouse space with hard benches. The nineteenth-century costumes have clearly been cobbled together at Value Village. Yet he’s lifted out of himself the way you hope to be at the theatre. Not as much by the play as by Sylvie’s friends, by the fearless way they step into a spotlight on a bare stage and declare their ideals. There’s Thea striding across the stage with a wonderful judicious demeanour, her pale matted hair arranged like a powdered wig. And that slight, frail, grey-haired kid is wonderful as William Wilberforce, ringingly voicing the abolitionist’s resolve: “We will do less, aspire less, to be better men.” Aiden jumps up for the ovation and takes the program home so Sylvie can see the acknowledgements on the back.
Thanks to: Sylvie Glasgow-Phimister, for inspiration. Jaspreet Khan, on the generator bike. Faun Phimister, for the future
.
The next day Aiden leaves work at four o’clock and cycles up to the hospital to visit his dad. He finds Rupert dressed and sitting in a chair. They do this in extended care. “You’re up,” Aiden says. “That’s great. Let’s go for a walk.” It takes a bit of coaxing, but eventually Rupert is out of the chair and shuffling along the corridor. He’s beetle-like now in his shape and movements: he’s aged ten years in the past few months. How cruel of life to require such change of the very old. They pause by a drinking fountain and Aiden presses the button. Rupert watches with interest, holding a trembling finger towards the silver arc. Purple blotches decorate his hand, bruising from all the anticoagulants they have him on.
Walking out of the hospital lost in thought, Aiden almost bumps into a small man in a grey suit, heading for the same pod of the revolving door. It’s Dr. Peter Saurette. Aiden defers to him and then calls hello as their separate glass fins release them into sunlight. Surprise, or something else, flashes across Saurette’s face. “Hi, how are you,” he says, and keeps walking. Aiden watches until he drops out of sight in the staff-only section of the parking lot. Lowering himself into a new Porsche Boxster, no doubt.
They’ve only ever had one client in common. He turns back into the hospital. A clerk with black bangs halfway over her eyes sits at the information desk.
“Jake Peloquin.” He spells it.
Her fingers are a blur on the keyboard. “6B, room 803.”
Saurette, the lousy prick. But 6B is not psychiatry. Aiden asks the clerk.
“It’s neurosciences.”
He takes the elevator up to the sixth floor, dread perched on his shoulders. In 803 the curtain is pulled around the bed. “Jake,” Aiden says. He hears a throat-clearing that he chooses to construe as an invitation, and slides open the curtain.
“God, buddy. What in hell happened?”
Defrag is trapped in a medieval torture device. A metal ring encircles his forehead, and bars descend from it, clamped into brackets on his shoulders. Screws or pins in each quadrant of the ring appear to be drilled into his very head, so that his skull is a part of the vise. Through the bars he stares silently at Aiden.
He has broken several vertebrae in his neck – it takes Aiden six or eight questions to extract this fact. Not too much damage to his spinal cord, so they don’t think he’s going to have any permanent mobility issues.
Aiden is still standing at the foot of the bed. “But how did it happen?” In his mind he sees the treacherous catwalks in Defrag’s building.
“Oh, just one of those things,” Defrag says, as if a weakness in his throat makes talking a huge effort. His skin is waxy pale and his forehead is smeared with orange disinfectant. He can’t move, clamped into that thing. And so he can’t laugh, and without laughter to obfuscate his meaning, he’s not going to talk. That’s how Aiden reads it.
“You had a fall?”
“Yeah, I guess you could call it that.”
A sense of Dr. Saurette lingers in the little cubicle. His expensive suit, his rectitude. Aiden himself is shambling, he’s a shambles. He reaches inside, tries to locate his customary professional composure, and comes up empty. Shrinks get to go through psychoanalysis, he reminds himself, as part of their training. It gives them a huge advantage. All that self-awareness, it’s a fucking
superpower
.
“Where were you, Jake?”
“I don’t entirely recall.”
“How did you fall? What did you fall from?” He wants to be closer, but if he moves to the side and sits down, Defrag won’t be
able to see him. In his iron cage Defrag shows a new proclivity for stillness. “Jake. Talk to me. Were you trying to end it?”
“Yes and no. I guess if I was really trying, I would have found a better way.”
If only one in ten feels grief, Aiden thinks, that one carries the grief of ten. An old fantasy washes over him, more seductive than ever: he’ll take Defrag up to Otter Lake to recuperate. That wooden recliner his dad built, he’ll drag it onto the lichen-covered rock, and Defrag can lie out there with the Hudson’s Bay blanket over him and sink into the small events of an afternoon in the northern wilderness. Watch the fish jump, the blue heron lift from the reeds, dragging its long legs after it. What’s stopped him inviting Defrag in the past? The rules, or conventions, or principles – he wonders at how slavishly he followed them. But now it’s just a matter of a few iron bars.
He’s still standing at the end of the bed when a nurse comes in to check Defrag’s vitals. Aiden watches her attach the blood pressure machine. She’s slender, fortyish, a lovely natural blond wearing yellow scrubs. He tries to judge her level of professionalism, whether she’s likely to tell him the whole story if he corners her in the hall. He puts his chances at low to nil.
“That’s really something,” he says.
“The halo?” says the nurse. “You’ve never seen one before? They are the cat’s ass. We used to keep people with this sort of injury in bed, with sandbags around them to keep them immobile. And then their muscles atrophied and they got pressure sores and pneumonia. But with this brace, Jake can get up and walk around. Soon. You’re looking forward to that, aren’t you, Jake.”
“Terrific,” Aiden says.
As though Defrag has spoken, the nurse bends over him with sudden warmth, and it seems to Aiden that the hum and clatter
of the hospital quiets. She fiddles with the
IV
feed in his arm. She straightens his blanket and cranks his bed up a notch. She sweeps a pudding cup and plastic spoon off the bedside table and into the garbage, graceful and quick. Before she leaves, she pours Defrag a fresh glass of water. Resting one hand gently on his shoulder, she holds up the glass so he can drink through a straw, and he lifts his eyes in silent gratitude.
When she’s gone, Aiden finally moves to the side of the bed. Close up like that, he feels a visceral shock at the sight of those pins – steel, or maybe titanium – bored mercilessly into Defrag’s skull.
“Any idea when you’ll get out?” He stands with his fingertips on his friend’s hand and adds – because what else is there to do? – “The Tuesday slot is yours. We can work on a pro bono basis for a while.”
Defrag says something, but at that moment, a cart crashes in the hallway and a nasal voice blasts, “Dr. Fairfax to Obstetrics, Dr. Fairfax to Obstetrics” and Aiden misses it. He bends over. “Pardon?” he says, but Defrag’s drawn his hand away and closed his eyes. He won’t respond. Aiden has to give up, he has to say his goodbyes and walk to the door, left to construct what he will from those few low syllables, left with the punishing conviction that what Jake Peloquin said just as the hospital leapt back to life was, “I’m afraid I can’t take you on at the moment.”
“Sit outside with me,” Aiden says to Liz after supper.
“It’s too hot.”
“Come on. There’s a breeze.”
“Let me finish putting the food away, then.”
He gets a rag from the garage and wipes down the mesh and iron chairs on the deck. The sun glowers from above the Callaghans’
garage across the back lane. Just before supper, a valve in the sky opened for about ten minutes and a ton of water was dumped on the city. Water that should rightly have fallen somewhere else, stolen from the poor and given to the rich. Now it’s sunny again and silver pools glint in the grass. This whole river city is a bowl of unfired clay – the water’s got nowhere to go. Wendy’s backyard elms are massive, verdant with all the rain. They look like broccoli. By next year they’ll be dead.
He tramps downstairs and drops the rag in the laundry, and then he gets his little cylinder of pot out of the basement freezer. A gift from Defrag the Christmas before last, this is the end of it, and mighty fine weed it was. His papers are in a tin on a rafter. He lifts down the tin and rolls his joint over the freezer, enjoying the taste of the paper on his tongue. An old impulse grips him, a familiar urge: to bottom out, to get a toehold on the lowest rung of his self-contempt so he can kick himself back up.
Out on the deck, Liz waves away the joint. She hitches her chair away from his. She’s wearing sunglasses.
“Can I get you a drink, then?” he asks. “How about a G and T?”
“No, I’m okay.”
They sit and stare at her flowerbeds, where all the shade plants are drooping, shocky from the sun and the heat.
“Did you go in to the office today?”
“No, I just did my email and calls from here.”
“Did you get next week sorted out?”
“Yeah. I’m taking until the twenty-fourth. That’s three times I’ve changed my holidays.”
“Oh well, that’s the boss’s prerogative.”
She recrosses her legs, refolds her arms. She’s thin, and her mouth is a thin, straight line, like her mother’s was for the last two decades. “Have you seen your dad this week?”
At the thought of the hospital, his sorrow heaves in his chest. “I went in today.”
“How was he?”
“About the same.”
Two kids walk down the lane carrying helium balloons that shine like silver bubbles in the aquarium air. Aiden takes a long toke and goes back to his perusal of the yard. No squirrels, he notes, the squirrels fled after their high-rises were demolished. But night crawlers have arrived: gargantuan earthworms have insinuated their way up from the riverbank and undermined the entire property. Mowing yesterday, Aiden almost broke his ankle – the lawn’s as lumpy and trenched as if it has been rototilled.
“If you leave that sawdust much longer,” Liz says, “it will spontaneously combust and we will have an L.A.-style fire.”
“Liz, the humidity is ninety-eight percent.”
“When are you going to take out the tree?” The spruce, she means, the tree the city workers damaged.
“I know,” he says. “I’ll get to it.”
A switch has been thrown, he thinks. Crisis does that to couples. It draws you together or it pulls you apart. They never mention Otter Lake. Let’s face it, were they ever fighting about the actual sale of a real property? The cottage has become notional.
A cyclist rides up the lane and brakes at their garage. He jumps off his bike with the timing and balance and strength of a guy at the absolute peak of his powers. It’s their putative son-in-law. They call hellos.