Liberty Street (37 page)

When her set was done, the band took a break and the crowd spilled outside to cool off and smoke cigarettes, and the hall went more or less quiet. Dooley went out too and I sat on my chair against the wall, resting my foot on another chair and trying to think what proof I could offer Dooley to keep uncertainty from creeping back in. I was almost the only person left in the hall. A woman with a cane and wearing white oxford shoes walked by and said, “Hello, Frances. How are you tonight?”

“Fine,” I said, “thanks. And you?”

“Oh, I'm all right for an old lady. Shame about this rain, though. Once in a hundred years, they're saying.”

Then she walked toward the bathrooms, tap-tapping her cane on the linoleum floor. I had no idea who she was.

I got up and stepped outside and found Dooley talking to someone, and I said I was ready to go home, but I could walk if he wanted to stay. He insisted on driving me, because of my foot.

On the way, I said, “You mentioned that you'd worked for a while in the bush north of here, right?”

He nodded and said that he had.

“The night of my wedding, there was a man—the one who brought the cap. Saul Something-or-other. He was older
than you by quite a few years. I remember that he worked in the bush and was married to an awful woman named Ginny. She sounded like a duck when she laughed.”

Dooley thought for a minute. “There was a guy named Saul and he might have worked in the bush, but I knew him because he sold homemade liquor and didn't care how old you were. I think his last name was Danko, or Demko. That was it, Demko. Why do you ask?”

I was picturing the bottle of homemade booze that Ginny had carried into the house on my wedding night. I was picturing the initials SC.

“The initials,” I said. “On the cap. SC. That cap definitely didn't belong to Saul Demko.”

“Oh,” Dooley said. “No, I suppose not.”

He sounded hopeful.

N
O HANDYMAN SHOWED
up at my door. I assumed they were all too busy for me and my basement. Many homes in Elliot had suffered the same fate as mine—almost four inches of rain overnight, a freak storm. I tried to buy a pump at the Co-op, but they were all sold out. When I explained my predicament to Dooley, he managed to borrow a pump, and he pumped the water out a basement window and then checked the electricity and said he thought I could turn the breakers to the upstairs back on. He suggested I buy a dehumidifier, and I got the last one in town. There was no point in even attempting to salvage the ruin in the basement, which I saw as a liberating gift. Dooley helped me out once again by offering to haul everything to the dump for me in his truck. I wouldn't let him do the work of carrying the Moons' waterlogged belongings up the stairs, and as a result it took me
days to get everything out and piled in a moulding heap in front of the house. Together, we carried up the few pieces of furniture that were heavy or awkward, and then we loaded up the truck.

The only keepsake I salvaged was my mother's mahogany tea caddy from England. It had floated to the surface of the floodwaters and washed up on the dry land of a stair tread. After Dooley left for the dump, I sat on the couch with the tea box and lifted the lid. There were still tea bags inside, although when I touched one the paper fell apart and loose tea spilled out into the bottom of the box like dust. The thought did not escape me that it had once survived a bombing in London and had now survived the disaster of a hopelessly flooded basement. It was the one thing I would take with me when I left, I decided. How could I leave it behind after what it had been through?

I held it in my hand and thought it was a lovely thing.

I
SCRUBBED DOWN
the basement walls and floor with bleach.

I bought a new smartphone and a data plan at a wireless outlet in town, and then booked a plumber to come and tell me if I needed a new furnace.

I went to visit Joe Fletcher.

“Is he in pain?” I asked, and nurses said no. They came in periodically to make sure he was comfortable. They were amazed that he was still alive. I waited, hoping he would open his eyes, perhaps speak, but he didn't. I thought of Esme Bigalow and how her eyes had popped open long enough for her to say the words “We are all such mysteries to one another.”
Perhaps Joe Fletcher would do something similar: “I want to come clean.”

While I was there, a priest came to visit. I told him I didn't think Joe Fletcher was Catholic and the priest said it didn't matter, he visited everyone. He stopped to see Mr. Weins in the next bed, but Mr. Weins wouldn't say a word to him and pulled the covers right up to his chin. When I asked the nurse afterward why Mr. Weins didn't say, “Help me, help me,” to the priest, she said he spoke only to women, and seemed to be afraid of men. Did he really believe he needed help? I asked. She said no, it was just something he liked to say, a way of communicating. He was waiting for a room in a nursing home, one with a dementia ward. His wife was being difficult and kept rejecting placements because they were too far away, she said, and she would not be able to visit him. The nurse said the wife couldn't visit him anyway because she was almost bedridden herself with arthritis. She kept threatening to take him home.

I followed the priest out to the parking lot after his visit with Joe. “Has he said anything to you?” I asked him. “You know, confessed any big sins on his deathbed?”

“No,” the priest said. “Although you know I wouldn't tell you if he did. Surely you know that.”

“I wonder if he could be pretending,” I said.

“To die?” the priest asked, incredulous.

“No,” I said, “that's not what I meant.” But I didn't explain further and left it at that.

I went back again the next day and sat by Joe's bed with my new phone, searching for information about comas and deathbed confessions. I tried to find out if it was possible that he could hear people talking to him. I tried to find cases of
people snapping awake from comas to say final words to their families, confess sins, make up for lost time in final hours. I found a story about a woman in Ontario who had gone public on behalf of her father, claiming that just before he died he'd admitted to killing the man who'd been having an affair with his wife, the woman's mother. I wondered if he really had confessed, or if she was confessing for him, having known that he was guilty all along. I tried to remember the name of Silas Chance's sister so I could find out if she was still alive. I didn't know enough about social media to use its resources, so I googled, entering words indicative of what I remembered—Silas's name, the year, Elliot, hit and run. Nothing useful came up. I wasn't sure why I was doing this. I didn't know what I would tell Silas's sister even if I could find her. Which version of his death was the correct one, if either? I knew which version I wanted to believe, but how could I be certain?

An explanation of how Facebook worked came from a young nurse-in-training doing a practicum, to whom I happened to say, “I'm trying to find someone. Does Facebook do that?” She returned when she got a break and set me up, saying, “My grandma's on Facebook. She doesn't really get it, but anyway.” She took a picture of me with my phone, and this became the profile picture for an account under the name Frances Moon. In the course of learning how to find friends—“Go ahead,” the student nurse said, “enter the name of someone you used to know”—I discovered that Ian was on Facebook. That came as a surprise.

“Look at that,” she said. “You found someone already. Now send him a friend request.”

“Later,” I said. “Thanks for showing me.”

She went back to work, but not before sending me a
friend request and then accepting it for me, and showing me how to send someone a message—too much information for one lesson, but I took notes.

After she left, I tried to get on Ian's page, but I couldn't. I saw who his friends were, though. He had eleven. His brother. His nephews. A couple of people whose names I recognized from his office. A woman named Meika.

Meika? I didn't know anyone by that name.

I looked up from my phone to see that Mr. Weins was considering going somewhere. “Help me,” he said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. I wasn't sure what to do.

“Be careful you don't fall,” I said to him, alarmed, but he ignored me.

He managed to rid himself of the bed covers and stand on both feet, but he looked as though he didn't know what to do next. He stood by the bed saying, “Help me, someone . . . help me,” and I felt terrible ignoring him but there was nothing I could do, or wanted to do, so I pushed the call button by Joe's bed.

Mr. Weins stood on his skinny, shaky legs then and looked right at me and said, “Get away from that man, you hussy.” He stood with one hand on the bed, swaying as though he might collapse, and said it over and over, getting more and more agitated, until finally a nurse arrived—Kelly this time—and told me that he likely thought I was his wife and couldn't figure out what I was doing sitting by the wrong bed. Kelly talked Mr. Weins back into bed and tucked him tightly in the sheets and he calmed down. He stared at me the whole time, his eyelids fluttering, until finally he closed them and nodded off.

Joe Fletcher's eyes remained closed. He gave no sign that he was aware of my presence, even though I'd said,
several times, “Joe, it's me, Frances.” It looked as though he was unconscious, inching toward the inevitable, but the nurses told me that just that morning he had opened his eyes, and they thought he understood what they were saying to him. Once I got the idea in my head that he could understand what people said to him, I couldn't get it out. I felt stupid talking to him, but I did anyway. I knew time was running out. I tried to be honest. “I was too young. My mother was right. I was too young and you were too old for me, and your friends terrified me.” It was as though I was trying on memories, getting my tongue around things that I'd never before spoken of. Once I said, “I was so frightened, I thought I would die. I thought someone was going to kill me. Not you, I didn't think that. But it all felt so out of control. And then the cap. Silas Chance's cap, or at least that's what I believed.” I thought I saw him twitch. When the student nurse came into the room, I pretended that I'd been singing to him so she wouldn't know what I was really saying. “Crazy,” the Patsy Cline song, a few scattered lines, since I couldn't remember the words. I tried not to think what a young nurse with no life experience might make of that.

As I talked, I studied Joe's eyelids, the rise and fall of his chest, his breathing, which was not erratic the way I thought a dying man's should be. He can hear me, I kept thinking. He's listening. I began easing my way into what I wanted from him. If anything good was going to come of me stepping on a rusty nail, it had to be this. “Joe,” I said, “is there something you want to get off your chest before you go? Silas Chance and that whole business with the cap. How it ended up in Saul's hands, and yours. It will help so many people if you tell me—more than you know.”

On the one hand, I thought it was possible. Joe Fletcher
would open his eyes and tell me the whole story as I imagined it happening, a drunken accident, the way Dooley thought it had happened but with a different vehicle, different people.

On the other hand, I knew what I was hoping for was far-fetched, and worse, I was being hugely self-important, because I was speaking as though I thought I was special, a person who meant something to this dying man, or some saint, able to conjure a miracle. St. Frances of Elliot. Hardly.

But I believed I saw the slightest movement of an eyelid.

“Just lift a hand,” I said. “Anything to let me know you understand what I'm saying. There's an opportunity. You should take it.”

Nothing.

I leaned back in my chair and studied Joe Fletcher, the man in the bed, the one I had married. It was the same man, but it was hard to imagine this man ever having had the strength for bush work in the dead of winter, and it was hard to imagine I'd ever convinced myself that he was as attractive as a movie star, or that I was in love with him. This dying old man was the first man I'd ever slept with, disastrously. As repulsed and frightened by him as I had once been, he now made me sad. He was dying alone. I knew I couldn't take the blame for that, but I felt guilty anyway.

The intercom crackled and a voice announced that visiting hours were over, and I left. As I passed Mr. Weins in the other bed on my way out, he opened his eyes and asked me if Joe was my son.

“No relation,” I said. “A friend of my father's.”

That seemed to satisfy him.

“Well, then,” he said, “you must be a good daughter.”

“No,” I said. “I am not a very good daughter.”

“Good for you,” he said.

Dooley made chicken and dumplings for supper that night, which we ate at his picnic table.

The next day, Joe Fletcher slipped into the final hours before his death. I was in the room with him when Kelly told me that it wouldn't be long. I didn't want to be there when he died. I didn't believe it was important for him to have someone there, especially not me, and it was clear that he was beyond making any kind of confession. Still, I leaned over him in the bed, leaned over his chest with its barely perceptible rise and fall, and said, “I accept that the disaster that was us was my fault. I was selfish, a silly teenager, Daddy's baby, as you said. But the fact is, you had his cap. You must have been there. And it was wrong to keep that secret. It was just wrong.”

I thought I saw an eyelid flutter. More distinct than the movement I thought I'd seen the day before.

I straightened up, stared at the body on the bed. His hand lifted ever so slightly off the bedsheet where it lay. Was that it? A confession? I leaned over him again, watching, confused, as though I were about to witness the saintly miracle, something that couldn't be explained—when the same hand came up from the top of the sheet again, came up completely unexpectedly, and caught me off-guard. The hand hit me in the chest, not hard—how could it, coming from a man so close to death?—but nonetheless I stepped backwards, and I lost my balance and fell, and my shoulder landed on one of the hard wooden arms of a chair, and then I fell sideways and hit my head on the radiator and landed on the floor.