Authors: Linden MacIntyre
“I’d be surprised if he wasn’t one of yours,” Sextus said to Duncan.
Duncan flashed a warning glance his way, but Sextus didn’t notice.
“Duncan was the guy who put a stop to all that shit. Weren’t you, Duncan? He was the guy the bishop would send out—”
“Dessert’s ready,” Effie announced.
After dinner they made small talk about home. Safe gossip, old stories that were mostly funny. Effie realized that she was drinking too much wine too quickly. She calculated that she’d consumed three stiff Scotches before the wine.
Fuck it
, she thought. It was one way to cope, not to care about the reefs and shoals so near the surface of every subject that came up.
JC proposed a toast: “To the second-last Christmas of the millennium.”
They all murmured excitement at the vastness of the thought.
“Here’s lookin’ at 1999,” he said. “A last great year.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Sextus. “Every year is a great year.”
“You know what I mean,” JC said.
“Nooo,” everybody said in chorus. “We don’t know what you mean!”
“Whatever,” he said. And they clinked glasses merrily.
“So how long do you plan to be around?” Effie asked Sextus.
“Who knows,” he said. “I’m playing it by ear. We should get together for a coffee, or a drink. Catch up.”
Right
, she thought.
As if
. But she said, “Absolutely. Give me a call. I assume you still have my office number.”
“Know it off by heart,” said Sextus.
“Have you been talking to our daughter lately?”
Sextus looked at her, pointedly, it seemed. “Ahhh, the darling daughter. On the phone, before I left. She said she was going to be away. Probably just saying that so she could avoid me.”
Susan caught his hand, squeezed it loyally and said, “I doubt that.”
“She’s away but back a week tomorrow,” Effie said. “Did she mention anything about the new guy in her life? This Ray?”
Sextus looked surprised. “Not a boo. Who is he?”
“Haven’t met him yet. But it seems serious.”
“Well, there’s another reason to stick around,” he said. He was clasping Susan’s hand in his.
Effie’s head was buzzing. Thoughts and words were scrambling to be heard, but she knew it would be prudent to keep most of them inside. JC was overgenerous with his booze, she noted. She’d speak to him.
Hospitality isn’t entirely about how shit-faced everybody gets
.
She smiled at “shit-faced,” a word her students liked to use. Her father would say “pissed to the gills,” and that too was apt. She was just about to offer coffee when, in the babble of words and laughter at the table, she heard a word that sounded like “fidelity.”
“Fidelity,” she said. “Now there’s a topic I could write a book about.”
There was a sudden silence, but she didn’t really care. Everyone was piss-gill-shit-faced. “I have one basic rule about fidelity,” she added merrily. “JC can sleep with anyone he wants to as long as she’s older than I am.”
She was the only one who laughed. She turned toward the kitchen counter, lined up the coffee mugs, turned again. Saw four round, blank faces staring at her.
“One rule only, that’s all,” she repeated. “Older than me … she has to be. That’s the bottom line.”
“Well, that kind of narrows it down,” Sextus said.
Susan giggled.
The room was suddenly and overwhelmingly hot.
“Excuse me,” Effie said.
In the bathroom she studied her face in the mirror but saw a stranger looking back. Older woman, well turned out but plain. Face pale, hair needing care.
Maybe I should cut it
, she thought. She
squinted and the image became sharper.
Maybe I need glasses
. Then she told herself,
Stop fretting about your looks. Think of aging as maturing, growing wiser. What did Daddy used to say? No point getting older if it doesn’t make you smarter
. But still she wondered. With an extended finger, she stretched the skin below an eye.
What else did Daddy say?
Overwhelmed, she dove toward the toilet.
She rinsed her face, restored her lipstick, then went to sit for a while on the edge of JC’s bed, head light but stomach feeling better. Loud laughter came from downstairs.
She sighed and stood. Her head spun, then stabilized.
In the darkened hallway near the top of the stairs, she saw Sextus standing, hands in pockets, a concerned look on his face. When she tried to brush by, he blocked her with a suddenly extended arm.
“Please,” he said. Then placed his forehead on her shoulder. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“About what, exactly?” she replied.
“Everything,” he said. “Tonight. Last year. Nineteen seventy-seven. My screw-ups, one and all.”
Then he was facing her, hands gripping her shoulders. She just stared at him. At that moment her entire life seemed to occupy one clear, sharp quadrant of her brain, like a Mozart composition, one of Einstein’s theories. Fully formed and ready for articulation.
“I just wish I could explain,” he said. “There was nothing—”
“Move, please,” she said.
He dropped his arms and she brushed by him and walked downstairs steadily, suddenly dead sober.
The next day being Boxing Day, she spent the night.
The battering wind seemed to scream, flattening the high brown grass in the marsh of Tantramar—the tantric marshes, Sextus called them, laughing wickedly. The wind pushed their small car onward and away from yesterday and toward tomorrow, a force as reassuring as the grass they’d smoked in a service station toilet back in sober Amherst, dispelling fear and purging all misgivings. She was singing farewell to Nova Scotia, the sea-bound coast, with the brown marsh grass undulating all around them and the sky dipping and swirling and clouds racing headlong with them toward an unseen finish line, the future. Laughter throbbed in her veins, the fear and anger falling far behind; faster, faster, through the Isthmus of Chignecto. “Isthmus be love!” she screamed, and wrapped her arms around his head so he could hardly see to drive, and the Chignecto wind now hurried them on, now tried to turn them back, as if it knew the future
.
I
t was the eve of the beginning of the last year of a millennium, and Effie Gillis was alone. She hardly ever answered the telephone at home. “That’s why God invented answering machines,” she would tell her friends. But that night she was waiting for a special call, and she picked up quickly when it rang.
The phone call was not the one she’d hoped for, but from the former husband whose name remained a hyphenated adjunct to her own (because he was the first and because she liked the Gaelic form of Gillis). John was calling for no apparent reason, which was, for her, another cause for some alarm. He didn’t even mention that it was New Year’s Eve. No “Happy New Year,” none of the traditional formalities.
John had an aversion to telephones not unlike her own, and even when he was in the darkest depths of the suffering she and Sextus had inflicted on him many years before, he had never called her or anyone else she knew to share his misery. So what was this about?
“I’m surprised you’re home,” he said. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”
“No, no,” she said. “I was just sitting here. How are you, John?”
“Ach, I’m okay.”
And then he was silent.
Her first assumption was that he was drinking again, but he sounded completely sober. She thought she could eliminate loneliness and boredom: she knew he suffered both, but she also knew how well he could suppress them. Which left the probability of illness.
“You’re sure you’re all right? You know Sextus is in town?”
“I heard he was going up. And did you see him, then?”
“Yes,” she said. “We all had Christmas dinner.”
“You did?” He laughed. “That’s just great.” He sounded as if he meant it. “I hear he has a new girlfriend.”
“Yes, she was here too. I was worried about giving her a drink.”
“Oh?”
“She looked like she was underage.”
“Hah,” he said.
“So what about yourself, John?”
“Ah well,” he said. “Look. I was just wondering. Are you going to be around in the new year?”
“Of course,” she said. “Are you planning a trip?”
“Ah no,” he said. “No plans. But a fella never knows. I’ve been doing some thinking.”
“It’s good to hear from you at any time,” she said.
“All right, then.”
Another long pause.
“I hope 1999 is good to you, John. You deserve it.”
“Ah well, I’m not so sure. But thanks. I hope you have a good one too.”
And he was gone, as enigmatic as ever.
She thought of calling him back, digging deeper. But it was almost
midnight in Cape Breton, almost 1999, so she let the impulse fade. And she was wondering about JC. She knew he planned to visit, but he had said he’d call first. According to the Hogmanay traditions he’d learned about while based in London years before, his arrival would be shortly after midnight. He’d bring gifts. He was a dark-haired man, a harbinger of good luck in the year ahead.
She’d just been getting out of the shower when John called. After that, she had dressed in something casually flattering—slim grey sweats and a black cotton turtleneck—and settled down for what she expected would be a short wait for JC’s call or, more likely, his inebriated arrival.
It was 12:43 when the phone rang again.
“Is this Dr. Gillis?”
The caller’s formality persuaded her to answer yes. He then identified himself as Sergeant something with the Metro Toronto Police Service.
“I’m calling about James Charles Campbell,” he said, as if he was reading the name from a document.
Her mind instantly processed the unfamiliar James Charles. “JC,” she said. “Yes. What about him?”
“There’s been an accident,” said the policeman. “Mr. Campbell gave your name. Or rather, he had your business card in his wallet. Are you by chance his … doctor?”
“Not that kind of doctor. I’m a friend,” she said. “What happened?”
“We aren’t exactly sure. We’re looking into it. It seems he fell, or got knocked down. On his street. Walden Avenue.”
“Where is he?”
“Toronto General. He’s under observation.”
When she got to the hospital, she found him asleep. She sat at his bedside for an hour, watching as he slept. There was a bandage on his head. A tube running from a plastic bag hanging on a pole delivered a clear liquid to his arm. He was pale.
What a way to start the year
, she thought. She struggled to suppress her fears. With him, she had what seemed to be an open-ended future. He had banished a nagging feeling of finality that had started after she’d turned fifty. Now his vulnerability had been revealed. She placed a hand on his, and the warmth was reassuring. His face, in sleep, was firm, his mouth firmly shut. His sleep was still and silent. The hospital shirt was open at the chest, and the curled hair she could see there stirred her, as did the snugness of the plastic band around his sturdy wrist.
“He’ll be fine,” the doctor said to her when he came in to check on JC. “By tomorrow you’ll see a big change. Give us twenty-four hours. Right now, he’s heavily sedated. We’re going to keep him that way for a while.”
So she went home.
January 2 was a Saturday. The hospital was quiet, the normal stream of visitors and staff reduced by the holidays. Perhaps it was the unnatural heat and humidity of the place that made her nervous, or the distracting sounds and smells of steamed food, biochemistry and crisis; the whispered private conversations in darkened rooms and the harsh impersonal announcements on an intercom; awkward visitors with coats on, solitary patients attached to IV poles or shapeless under sheets. By the time she reached his room, she was feeling vaguely miserable.
He was propped up slightly on the bed, eyes closed. She touched his hand.
He smiled a brief, thin greeting. “I was just thinking,” he said, “what it must be like to be stuck here with some chronic illness.”
He looked away, toward the window. “I wouldn’t have blamed you for finding an excuse to stay away. Hospitals. Christ, deliver me.”
“Come on,” she said. “A hospital is a hopeful place. I was here yesterday, but you were sleeping.”
“They told me. Maybe I’m just antsy because I see a lot of hospital in the future.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” she said, forcing a laugh.
“Look at me, flat on my back. And because of some teenage punk …”
“Please,” she said. “There was an accident. You got conked on the head.”
“I don’t know,” he said, examining his hands. “I don’t know—there was a day.”
“What happened?” she asked.
He grimaced. “Actually, it was the cat’s fault.”
“The cat?”
The story came out in fragments. The cat had bolted just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. JC was placing an empty wine bottle in his recycling box on the back deck before setting out for her place. The cat slipped between his legs and vanished up a fence and a tree and onto the roof. JC followed, up the fence, from the top of which, by stretching, he could reach a fire escape.
The cat, being long-haired and snow white, shouldn’t have been all that hard to find in the darkness. Effie had named him Sorley, after a white-haired Scottish poet whose work she taught to undergraduates. She could easily imagine it: JC up on the roof, prowling, swearing quietly, angry mostly at himself for the momentary
carelessness that enabled the cat to dash for the deck while the patio door was open.
JC’s roof was part of a continuum of rooftops on Walden, which though called an avenue was more like a narrow one-way lane between two rows of old, mostly semi-detached houses in what had once been a factory area but was now a second Chinatown. JC lived in number 14.
He stood on the roof for a long time, watching for movement. On an earlier visit to the rooftops he’d learned to avoid skylights, of which there were four, having once inadvertently peered down and caught sight of two naked men struggling in what seemed to be an act of intimacy.
He finally spotted the cat about four units along, on the roof of number 20, he estimated. Being an indoor cat, Sorley had the kind of confidence that apparently diminished as the surroundings lost familiarity. To proceed farther, he’d have to leap a gap between number 20 and 22, so he’d settled down to await the inevitable recapture, eyes serenely shut, his thick tail tucked tidily along a silky flank. JC gathered him up without a word and was about to make his way back in the direction of his own place when he heard a shout from the street below.