The Wreckage (27 page)

“Jesus,” Bella said. “He told you that?”

“He never said a word around us women. He was up drinking with Clive when all this came out. I heard it from David, after we got married.” Agnes paused there, and Mercedes steeled herself, gripping the straps of her shoulder bag and hanging on. “I keep thinking of Hardy out there like that,” Agnes said, “watching the boats sail by.”

“We don’t know,” Mercedes said. “We don’t know what happened to him except his ship went down.” She was trying to keep the anger from her voice. “Don’t torture yourself.”

“Leave her alone, Mercedes.”

“Can we just be quiet and watch what’s going on?” she said.

Bella looked away and hugged her aunt’s arm tighter. And no one said another word.

Mercedes didn’t know that Hardy was on his way to join the merchant marine the last time she saw him in St. John’s. Johnny insisted she write a letter home after Marion was christened and she included a picture of the baby in her silk shantung gown. Agnes wrote back, sending a copy of Hardy’s obituary. Dead more than a year before Mercedes heard, a year that he’d been living on in her head. Fishing, she thought, where her father had spent his life fishing, raising his own children with Ruthie. It made her feel like a fool to have imagined him happy all that time and finding some measure of happiness in imagining it.

The speakers went on and on, she didn’t know why a memorial service had to be as interminable as the war it commemorated. A cold rain began to fall just as a young cadet lifted a bugle to play “Taps” and Mercedes felt gut-foundered suddenly, so greedily hungry that the world seemed to drop under her feet. A whiff of ammonia flooded her nostrils and she grabbed uselessly at Aggie’s coat before she hit the sidewalk.

2.

T
WO PEOPLE WERE STANDING
at the foot of her bed when she came to herself, Isabella and a young man in a white lab coat who was saying, “Most of the effects of a concussion are temporary. It all depends on the severity.” He looked barely old enough to drive a car. “And things are complicated in this case by the concussion sustained in her earlier accident. Some of these effects are cumulative. And with someone as elderly as your mother.”

“I’m right here,” Mercedes interrupted. She closed her eyes again. “I can
hear
you.”

“Mrs. Boustani,” the doctor said cheerfully.

“How long have I been here, Bella?”

“Since yesterday, Mom.”

“Yesterday?”

“Do you remember any of our conversations, Mrs. Boustani?”

Mercedes looked at the doctor. “No,” she said angrily.

“Do you know my name?”

“I’ve never laid eyes on you in my life.”

He smiled at her. “I’m Dr. Mullaly. I’ll be looking after you while you’re here. You gave yourself a nasty knock. We’re going to keep an eye on you for a few days.”

She tried to sit up. “Where’s Johnny, Isabella? Where’s your father?”

“He’s right here, Mom.” She pointed to the shoulder bag in a chair by the bed.

Mercedes slumped back against the pillow. “I hate hospitals,” she said. “They have such a …” A look of confusion and fear crossed her face.

“What is it?” the doctor said.

She took a breath of air through her nostrils, searching for the ubiquitous medicinal smell she detested. But there was only a stark blankness.

“You were going to say something, Mrs. Boustani.”

“No, nothing. Never mind.”

“Mrs. Boustani,” Mullaly said. “Did you have a word in your head that you weren’t able to get ahold of just then?”

“No,” she said.

He was about to ask something else when Agnes came into the room carrying a Tupperware container and waving a copy of the
Evening Telegram
.

She said, “You made the paper, Sadie.”

“Oh
fuck.”

“Mom,” Bella whispered.

Agnes placed the Tupperware container on the table tray and opened the paper across the bed. “Here, here, here,” she said. “‘The commemoration was interrupted briefly when Mrs. Mercedes Boustani (nee Parsons) collapsed.’”

Mercedes’ eyes rolled back in her head.

“‘She was attended by St. John Ambulance workers at the scene,’” Agnes read, “‘and transferred to the Health Sciences Centre where she is being treated for a concussion. Mrs. Boustani, a Newfoundland native originally from Little Fogo Island, is the widow of Lieutenant Johnny Boustani (ret.) who was stationed in St. John’s during the Second World War.’”

“How do they know all that?”

Agnes looked up at her sister, her mouth open. “They asked me.”

“Jesus
, Agnes.”

“All right,” Dr. Mullaly said. “That’s enough excitement for now. You need to rest, Mrs. Boustani.”

Bella opened the Tupperware and offered it to her mother. “Have a muffin, Mom.”

“Just out of the oven,” Agnes said.

Mercedes picked one from the container and brought it to her mouth. The heat was still in it, but she couldn’t smell a thing. She felt as if her head was stuck inside a box of Styrofoam. “I’m not hungry,” she said. There were tears in her eyes and she looked away out the window.

“Maybe it would be best,” Dr. Mullaly suggested, “if we gave your mother some time alone to rest.”

And the three of them stepped out of the room together.

By the third day Mercedes was able to sit in a reclining chair beside her bed and watch the tiny television set for an hour at a time before her head started throbbing. Bella went downstairs to the cafeteria for a coffee while Mercedes was watching a husband and wife throw chairs at one another on a daytime talk show. She heard her name being called softly and turned to see Amina holding a black leather purse in both hands, looking expectantly at the woman asleep in the bed beside her own.

“She a friend of yours?” Mercedes asked.

“Someone I knew years ago. During the war. I didn’t even know she was in town.”

“She don’t look well.”

“She was in the paper. They said she hit her head.”

Amina was colouring her hair jet black. She wore a dark sleeveless blouse, a black skirt above the knee and high-heel shoes, as if she were on her way to the USO for a dance. The legs of a thirty-year-old.

“Is she in a coma?”

“Amina,” Mercedes said, smiling.

The woman darted a look across the room. “Mercedes?” she said. “Mer
ced
es? You
witch.”

“My God, girl, you haven’t changed in fifty years.”

Amina came across the room and leaned into her, kissing both cheeks. She sat on the edge of the bed and held her hand. “How long are they going to keep you here, Mercedes?”

“If I don’t wet the bed tonight or go on a raving streak, I’m a free woman.”

“You’re not in a hotel, are you? You have to come stay with me when they let you out.”

Mercedes smiled and squeezed her hand, to put off disappointing her. She thought of the first time she went to the Waterford River with Amina and her mother to pick spearmint. She didn’t know how to tell it from grass. “You Newfoundlanders,” Rania had said. “There is more to taste in the world than salt.” She picked a blade and crushed it in her fingers, held it to Mercedes’ face. “You see?” she said. “It grows everywhere and not a soul on this island can see it for what it is.” The locals called the Lebanese
grass-eaters
for this peculiar habit of theirs, picking and cooking weeds from the riverbanks. The scent of it still brought Mercedes back to that kitchen at Rawlin’s Cross, to those loud, ridiculously beautiful women. It was the cleanest smell she’d ever encountered, so intense and vibrant and clear it was almost a place of its own. It occurred to her she might never experience it again. Mercedes said, “You’re alone now, Amina?”

“I have the two boys, they keep an eye on me.”

“What about your Mom and Dad? And Maya and Sammy?”

“They’re dead now, of course. Maya and Sammy went back to Lebanon in the fifties.” And a moment later she said, “Were you going to call me while you were in town?”

Mercedes looked up at the television, where the husband and wife were being held at bay by men in blue T-shirts with the word SECURITY stamped across the backs. The audience on their feet and cheering. The husband and wife were pointing at one another, shouting.

“I’m sorry to hear about Johnny, Mercedes.”

She said, “Were you happy, Amina? In your marriage?”

“I’ve been alone ten years. I hardly remember being married. Most of the time, I guess I was.”

“Me too,” she said. “I keep forgetting how lucky a thing that was.”

“And how is Marion? She must be nearly fifty herself now.”

Mercedes turned from the television. She hadn’t intended to call her or anyone else in town. To avoid this one inevitable conversation.

Amina put a hand to her mouth. “Oh,” she said.

“It was a lifetime ago,” Mercedes said. “She wasn’t eighteen.”

“What happened?”

“Just one of those things,” she said. She left it there, and the two women looked about the room, like suburban neighbours who’d run out of things to say about the weather. Mercedes’ head ached.

“Do you remember Lilly?” Amina said finally.

“Wish’s aunt Lilly?”

“She’s living in town. At St. Pat’s Mercy Home.”

“She’s still alive?”

“She was a few months ago. Turned ninety. I saw the birthday announcement on the suppertime news. They showed a picture and everything.”

Mercedes touched her forehead with the tips of her fingers. “Would you turn off that television for me? I’ve got such a headache.”

“I should go and let you rest.”

Mercedes looked at Amina but couldn’t recall her name. “Where’s Isabella?” she said.

“You should have a little lie-down,” Amina said, and she took Mercedes’ arm and helped her up from her chair. She settled her in bed, kissed both her cheeks again. “I’m in the phone book,” she said. “You call me when you feel better.”

Mercedes was asleep before Amina was out the door.

Marion took her mother to find the cotton candy on the midway while Johnny went into the tent where the afternoon program was about to begin. Mercedes didn’t really care for cotton candy, sickly sweet and that clot of matted tissue dissolving in her mouth. But it was preferable to the small-time rodeo that her husband had come for. Women in cheerleader outfits circling the ring to start the events, cowboy hats and spangled boots, American flags set in leather holders in front of the stirrups. She wasn’t sure if the girls or the horses were less appealing to her.

They’d spent the last half of the summer travelling across the Midwest and the prairies. Marion had just finished high school and was going to a small art college in California in the fall. They drove through the Black Hills of South Dakota and up into Montana, planning to head south then through Idaho and Nevada on the way to dropping her at the college. All the way from Forsythe to Custer they passed signs advertising the rodeo, each one featuring a scantily clad cowgirl smiling on horseback. And after each sign, Johnny became more insistent. “A ro-
day
-o, Mercedes,” he said. “When will Marion get another chance to see one?”

“Maybe Marion doesn’t want to see a ro-
day
-o at all, Johnny Boustani.”

“Why don’t we ask her?”

They both looked back over the front seat to their daughter.

She said, “Watch the road, Dad.” And then, “Would there be cotton candy?”

She had her father’s dark hair and Mercedes’ eyes and she had grown taller than either of her parents, so that at first glance she seemed much older than her years. They both doted on her, more and more as it became clear she was going to be their only child. Marion had a certainty about her that reminded Mercedes of her grandmother, though it didn’t lead to any smallness in the girl. When she was eleven her class went on a field trip to the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston, and she came home with her mind made up to paint. They scraped together enough money to give her private art tutorials, driving her into Boston on weekends for life-drawing or watercolour classes. They spent part of each Saturday at public galleries, and once or twice a year went back to the Gardner to allow Marion to revisit her favourite pieces. An opera singer by Degas in a high-necked black dress. A Botticelli of the Virgin and Child attended by an angel.
The Concert
by Vermeer. Mercedes had no idea what was in them to hold her daughter’s interest. “You know, Marion,” she’d say, leaning in close to the Rembrandt self-portrait, “he hasn’t aged a day since we were here last.”

Marion took a dollar from her coat pocket. “Cafeteria,” she said. “Go. Give me an hour.”

She often felt as if Marion was the adult in their relationship, that the girl tolerated her parents’ foolishness with the kind of bemused forbearance a mother offers her children. Distracting her with cotton candy on the midway to allow Johnny to watch cowgirls circle the ring in Custer, Montana. They wandered through the crowds away from the main tent as the music struck up inside, picking at the pink clouds of cotton candy as they went. The thrum of the horses’ hooves making the ground shake underneath them.

At the heart of the incident, she learned afterwards, was the flag.