View From a Kite (27 page)

The hospital corridors are full of shell-shocked relatives, desperate for good news and terrified of what they'll hear. Elizabeth went down to the chapel to pray for Mama when they moved her out of the ICU, and she said all the folding chairs were taken and there were people kneeling on the floor at the back. The snow has been building up outside the windows, drifting and piling until it is halfway up the panes and it seems as if the hospital is sinking, as if we're all going down with it.

Why didn't she stop him? Why didn't she notice there was something wrong with him? Why didn't she make him go back to his doctor, make him take his pills, make him go back to the hospital for another rest? She always closed her eyes and hoped nasty, scary things would go away. She always pretended everything was all right when it wasn't. Why did she tell me he was just tired, when his eyes were nothing but terrible empty black holes? Why did she let him keep guns in the house? She didn't like them, and he hadn't gone hunting since his twenties—why didn't she make him get rid of them? Why didn't she do something? Why didn't I?

There is singing, sweet gentle harmony drifting from the hallway, from the other side of the nurses' station. I peer out the small glass peephole to see who it is. It's the Sally Ann, with their ugly hats and navy blue uniforms with the red trim. They have left behind their blatting horns and clanging cymbals, their booming drums and crashing tambourines—the patients in this ward are very sick and some of them are not going to get better, and the band is singing as close to a lullaby as they know how. In four part harmony they are almost whispering “Silent Night” and “O, Little Town of Bethlehem.”

I wrench my eyes tight to stop the leaking and I whisper the words quietly and finally I try to sing them out loud. I can't get most of the notes, my voice leaks like a basket and won't hold them properly, but I sing as many as I am able to because she loves it when you sing to her.

CHAPTER 56

I help Elizabeth put all the Christmas decorations back up. When we got home they were there—tinsel and lights and a decorated tree, and the manger scene with its three-legged sheep and tailless cow, and the Wise Men (Melchior with a chipped nose)—but when I got up the next morning they had all been taken down and packed away. I want them back up, even though Christmas Day has passed, because we are hoping to bring Edith home for a visit and I want her to see them.

Mama was cremated. We had a very quiet service in Elizabeth and George's church and then went back to a houseful of casseroles and biscuits and bread and mincemeat and apple and cream pies. A few cousins came by but didn't stay long; they left us alone when they saw how tired we were. There is nothing to say. Nothing I want to say or hear. After they left and it was just we three, Elizabeth put the casseroles in the freezer and we scrambled eggs with bacon and ate fresh biscuits with butter and jam. Over cups of hot strong tea I persuaded her and George it wouldn't be disrespectful to Mama to put the decorations back up. I convinced them we ought to re-decorate because the house needs to be cheerful and bright for Edith, who responds to less and less as each day goes by. I need Edith to be happy and I need her to be able to see me when her eyes drift in my direction.

George brings the tree back from the woodshed, where they'd hurriedly stuffed it, and sets it back up in the living room. I rearrange the manger scene, adding fresh straw and re-attaching the head shepherd's left hand with glue on a toothpick. He'd fallen victim to the same haste that had rolled a gold glass ball away from the skirts of the tree to be scuffed against the wall, where it broke and lay undiscovered until I stepped on it with a bare foot.

Every day Elizabeth phones the home, and finally they agree to let Edith out for a few hours on New Year's Day afternoon. George and Elizabeth go to get her, but they won't let me come because I've been having a weepy morning, and they say I need to rest or I'll just wear myself out and upset Edith. I lie on the couch in the living room, my bandaged foot on a pillow, crossing my eyes to blur the lights on the tree, eating pie. I have been finding some comfort in food, an unusual approach to coping with grief for me, but slabs of pie seem to have a soporific effect. There is the usual plastic vial of pills for me to take, drugs that are supposed to moderate the emotional response and dull the pain—but I'd rather eat pie. I've had enough of those pills to last a lifetime. They turn you into a walking zombie, so all you want to do is doze. The world sinks into a distant melancholy, and nothing much matters. You can eat pie and cry on it and the saltwater just adds to the taste. Fill your mouth with enough lemon cream filling and meringue and pastry, and your brain stutters and shuts down and leaves you in peace. Pie leaves no chemical aftertaste on your tongue, it doesn't smother you in mind-wool for days on end. I'm not going to fit into Elaine's lavender abomination if I keep this up, though. If I screw up the carefully planned and balanced wedding photo, she will have my guts for garters. She's welcome to them.

There are all kinds of horrible things to be dealt with, a hand of cards I'm expected to play, and it's mostly about money. It took all kinds of legal machinations to get the house in town sold because Mama was still alive but not legally able to make decisions and I was and am still a minor. If that lawyer hadn't wanted the place so bad, and had the time and patience to set up and jump through all the legal hoops, it never would have gotten sold. Mama's part of the money went to the hospital where they looked after her, and mine went into an education fund so I can go to university.

Now there's another house to do something with. Edith's house isn't Edith's house at all. Apparently it's mine. She inherited the savings and the insurance money and Robert got the property—it was left to him by Edith's father, with the provision that Edith could live in it as long as she wanted to, and was able to, and it couldn't be sold out from under her. The home wanted it sold so they could have the money in exchange for keeping her; there's nothing left of the money she inherited, she used it to live on all these years. When George went to the lawyer about the house, that's when we found out it isn't hers at all. I'm the sole legal owner. So the home gets Edith's old age pension but nothing else, and as soon as word gets out and the weather turns fine those tourists in their big motor homes and flowered shorts and t-shirts that say “I'm With Stupid” are going to be coming after me, trying to get me to sell them the last of the waterfrontage. I have to decide what to do with it. Do I want to keep it? Live in it some day? If I do I have to rent it out so it can be lived in and have someone to do repairs, which it badly needs, and so I can pay the taxes every year, which aren't much but are more than I have coming in. Which is zilch.

Except for:

The blood money.

Which I don't want anything to do with.

They had life insurance. Robert and Mama got life insurance when they had me and George kept it up for Mama after she couldn't anymore. Robert's insurance money was forfeited because he killed himself, but since Mama didn't try to kill herself, now that she's dead they're going to give me one hundred thousand dollars. Whoever decided that my mother is worth one hundred thousand dollars to me is a stupid fucking asshole. When George told me the insurance company was going to give me all this blood money I had to eat an entire mincemeat pie before I could breathe, I was so crazy mad. I threw it up all over the back step and had to hose it off into the snow. All the crows gathered and I tried but couldn't hit any of them with the rocks I was flinging about. Crows are incredibly smart and agile and I'm glad I didn't hit one.

Maybe I should just sell Edith's house and be done with it. But I don't know. How am I supposed to know if I will want it ten years from now? Or five? Or tomorrow? Ten minutes from right now?

I'm an orphan, a moneyed, propertied orphan. I could go anywhere, travel, live in Paris for a year and pretend to be a writer. Find a guy to die for. If you eat an entire butterscotch pie with extra whipped cream and chocolate sauce you can make yourself so sick you can almost pass out.

CHAPTER 57

Edith spends most of the day lost. She floats around in her own internal sky, her mind a cloud that can't be grasped. On the outside she's shrunk, even the bones holding her up seem smaller. Sometimes she smiles a very sweet smile if you distract her with something bright, but mostly she just floats around in her head, out of reach. She doesn't really know me anymore, though when she does notice me, she seems to like me. Her hair has been thinning and falling out and her head is pink under a nebula of white fluff. She sits in George's big chair with her hands curled on her lap. If you don't help her to eat, she forgets she has to. There are too many people like her in that home and not enough staff, says Elizabeth. That's why Edith is losing weight; they don't have the time to spoon feed her, to coax her into just one more bite. We have to get her out of there. I'm not sure how, but we have to figure something out or she'll slowly starve to death. I sit on the ottoman beside her and feed her bits of Elizabeth's date squares, which she used to love and still seems to like. I have to break them in small pieces and push them into her mouth and then, when they're in there, she seems happy to chew and swallow them.

George and Elizabeth's sons and daughters-in-law drop in to eat mincemeat tarts and whipped shortbread cookies and pork pies and date squares, drink tea and talk, and mull over what to do with Edith. A few cousins come by and stay for a cup of tea and a plate of sweets. Donna brings her infant, who has already grown out of the booties I almost crippled my hands making. Donna takes her cup of tea and hands me the infant, a dribbling, drooling lump in a fuzzy one-piece thing with snowmen in top hats, and red-and-white-striped canes, printed on it. I take the little spitball and walk it around the house for half an hour to give its mother some peace. There's a brain ticking over in that semi-hairless skull, you can see it in the eyes. It's got arms like windmills and I have to put it on a bed for a minute and take out my earrings and tie a bandanna around my head before it rips my earlobes to shreds and snatches me bald. I don't have all that much hair, but it still manages to get a good fistful in its gummy little paw and pull. Grab, grab, grab, it's as bad as Denise with a box of chocolates. It doesn't like being laid on its back and starts to flap its arms and kick and squawk.

“Patience, Spitball,” I tell it as I slip my earrings into my pocket and bend over to pick it up again. “Cease and desist.” But it's got no patience and bats me a couple of times in the face to express its displeasure. I have to admit I admire its spunk; I'm much bigger than it is and I could drop it on its head on the floor if it really pissed me off, but does it care? Not one speck. It just wants to get its point across.

“Good baby,” I coo. “Good little Spitball. You just keep it up.”

We wander around together for a while and I let it grab all the tinsel it wants and then I fish the tinsel out of its outraged mouth when it discovers, again and again, that tinsel doesn't taste anywhere near as good as it looks. It's evidently on some sort of organic, Greenpeace-approved diet and sugar has never crossed its drooling virgin lips, so I surreptitiously feed it some date-square crumbs. It gums happily away at the stuff, slobbering and burbling, and shows no signs of wanting to blow up, throw up, or turn into a Progressive Conservative. We bond away until it screws up its face into an approximation of Santa Claus—all red and wrinkled—grunts like a pig, and then its nether end begins to reek and I am forced to hand it back to its mama.

“I think Gwen should sell,” says George Jr.'s wife, Marci. Marci is about four foot nothing in all three dimensions and she's got lots of opinions. “She could get a fortune for that old place.”

“But…” I say.

“Don't be jumping the gun, Marci,” says George. “There's no hurry.”

“It's falling to bits,” says George Jr. “But she could still get a good price for it, if she don't wait too long.”

“Did you hear what the MacIsaacs got for that old shack of theirs down the road?” says Ranald, the second son. “And it's not even on the lake, just got a right of way.”

“Forty thousand,” says George Jr., reverently. “Some Americans forked over forty thousand. Going to put a sunroom on it and redo the plumbing. Put in a Jacuzzi.”

“I don't want to sell,” I say.

“See,” says George, “what did I tell you? Gwen is smart to hold onto it. Land never goes down in price, God isn't making any more of it.”

“Well she can't let it fall into the ground,” says Marci. “She'll have to have some work done on it. Then I suppose she could rent it for a few years.”

Donna hands me back the spitball and I take it for another little stroll. Upstairs to look at Elizabeth's African violets, the overflow from the living room and dining room. Leaves fall off the plants and she can't bear to kill them, so she sticks them in dirt and then they root and then they need their own pot. She's got dozens. When we come back they're discussing repairs and the cost and who might be available and reliable.

“What about Red Walter?” Elizabeth is asking. “He did Minnie's kitchen, did a lovely job I hear tell.”

“Gone on a bat,” says Ranald. “He won't be sober enough to swing a hammer for weeks. What about the Johnstone brothers?”

“Busy right up to next fall,” says George. “Got a contract to work on the new Village Inn Motel in Sydney.”

“What about Bennie?” asks Donna.

Everybody stops and looks over at Donna's husband, Bennie, who has been sitting quietly on a kitchen chair in a corner all afternoon, shovelling pork pies into his mouth. Donna's got him on some kind of Greenpeace, environmentally approved diet too, and he's been sugaring up while she's distracted by the relatives.