Losing It (29 page)

Julia rolled restlessly in the bed, the time dragging painfully. Finally, when she knew for certain that sleep like this was hopeless, she got up, walked in the darkness into Matthew’s room and lifted him out of his bed. How heavy he was getting! Without even opening his eyes he reached out, his mouth open. In her bedroom they snuggled into the big bed together, lying on their sides. She latched him on and held him, stroked his impossibly fine hair. He wasn’t really hungry at first. She had to coax him, wake him a bit before he began to feed in earnest. Then it was almost as if he were cleansing her, pulling
the jangle out of her thoughts, slumbering her limbs; as if together they were the centre of everything, this nucleus, right now; that nothing else mattered, really; that the sweet milk of deepest sleep would soon be on its way.

It was almost, almost enough.

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D
onny pressed the bell, leaned on his right palm against the door frame, waited. It was cold this early in the morning; he shivered in his light jacket. Everything looked different in this light, too. The last time he’d been here …

Well, he wasn’t exactly a guest.

He pressed the bell again. He expected Julia, was ready to search her eyes to see what she remembered, if she at all remembered his touching her that night, massaging her back and shoulders and arms, naked in her bed. But it wasn’t her, it was her father, a hefty man in a suit, in a hurry.

“Yes?” the man said, looking like he knew Donny was here begging for money or something.

“You must be Mr. Carmichael,” Donny said. “I’m Don Clatch, I’m here to do the -”

“Who?”

“Donny Clatch. Julia hired me to -”

“I’m not a Carmichael,” the man said, and Donny looked at him in confusion, then in slowly dawning disbelief. Oh shit, he thought.

“I’m sorry,” he said and looked again. It wasn’t her father, it was her husband, this older, heavy, angry guy in the suit. Donny had to stop himself from shaking his head. Why did Julia Carmichael have to pick someone like that?

Then Julia was there – in her bathrobe still – making the introductions, smoothing things over. “Donny helped me the other night with my mother,” she said to her husband as they were all walking back to the kitchen. “He drove me around, and carried Matthew. He even came to the hospital.” She said it with no hidden meaning, looked Donny straight in the eye for a moment. So she didn’t remember, didn’t know. A switch must have flicked in her brain when they’d gotten home.

In the kitchen, Donny could see the mother endlessly opening and closing drawers, and little Matthew playing with the dishwasher buttons. Things got quiet suddenly between Julia and her husband. When Donny looked at them he could see them glaring at one another, this silent argument happening in front of him.

Finally Julia broke the gaze, looked at Donny and said, “Do you fix toilets?”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“Ours has stopped draining,” she said, and pointed down the hall.

The husband said, stiffly, “I have to go.” He stayed where he was though, watching, for a terrible moment, before finally turning away while Julia watched him, furious about something.

Donny excused himself and walked to the bathroom, took a preliminary tug at the toilet handle. Water filled the toilet bowl and circled dispiritedly without draining. A bit of soggy toilet paper lolled at the bottom. There was a plunger by the side of the tub. He tried not to listen, though it felt as if his whole body had turned into a pair of ears. But he didn’t hear anything
else between them. He used the plunger several times without success, then returned to the kitchen. Julia’s husband was gone. Julia was wiping the counter angrily, Matthew was still banging away at the dishwasher buttons. Julia’s mother had gone into the living room. Donny could see her tugging at the drawers of the side table.

“I’ve got a snake in my truck,” he said. “Did anybody put anything unusual down the toilet lately?”

“Bob was sick last night,” Julia said. “He might have used a lot of toilet paper, I guess.”

“The clog might just be in the trap,” Donny said. He went out to his truck and got the twenty-five-foot snake, which he kept neatly coiled near the back. Then he returned and spent twenty minutes freeing the trap, but that didn’t solve the problem; the water still didn’t drain. He tried the sink and the bathtub, and they didn’t drain either. He walked back to the kitchen, but no one was there. They all seemed to be upstairs. Donny waited for another moment, almost raised his voice, thought about walking up to talk to Julia. Finally he decided to just go down to the basement on his own.

He looked for the stack on the main sanitary drain. Normally it would be in the floor close to the water meter and it afforded access so the pipe could be rodded out all the way to the sewer. But older houses could be full of surprises. This basement had a low ceiling and he fumbled for a few minutes trying to find a light. Finally he found a pull-string on a naked bulb near the central beam. It took a while for his eyes to adjust.

The laundry room was neat and orderly, had a worn but warm green rug, a new washer and dryer, an ironing board set up in the corner. There was another room beside it with just a concrete floor, boxes and old furniture piled haphazardly. The third section of the basement was the furnace room, which was
packed, also chaotically, with garden tools, old lumber, more boxes, ski equipment, a mouldering set of storm windows, and other junk lost in the shadows. Donny tried to find the light for the furnace room, finally gave up and walked back out to his truck, then returned with his flashlight. There was no working light for the furnace room. The one fixture he found by the fuse box had no light bulb in it.

And there was no stack. He checked all around the water meter and followed the natural line of the drain to the connecting upstairs pipes, moved boxes and an old rocker, a trunk, some lawn chairs, scraps of lumber and ancient kitchen tiles. Nothing. The plumbing seemed to have been constructed without thought to the possibility that the drain might someday become blocked. The pipes were cast-iron, and Donny reluctantly sized up where he would have to split them to put in a proper stack. He took out his tape and pad, made a little diagram and took some measurements.

Then he went back upstairs to the kitchen, which was still empty. He waited, and finally walked up to the second floor. They were all in the baby’s room. Julia had changed into pants and a loose sweater, was on her knees on the floor sorting piles of baby clothes. Matthew was on the bed playing with a toy truck, saying “Brmmmm!” and sending it off the edge and onto the floor. The old lady was opening and closing dresser drawers.

“It’s a bit more complicated than I thought,” Donny said. “I’m going to have to crack the pipe because there’s no stack.”

“No what?” Julia asked.

Donny explained it to her, slowly, because she didn’t seem to be following very well. He told her that all houses were supposed to have an access stack to the main drain, that he needed to build one so he could rod out the clogged area, clear the pipe to the sewer. He said he’d done it several times before, could
save her quite a bit of money over a plumber or a drain service. He even had a drain rodder he’d bought in a used-machine shop. It had a fifty-foot flexible rod and four-inch cutters, so he should be able to get whatever the problem was, even tree roots. “Unless the pipe has collapsed. That happens, sometimes, with older pipes. But we’ll have to see.”

Julia nodded. She looked washed out. “If you could look after it,” she said numbly, “I’d really appreciate it.”

“I’ll have a try, anyway,” he said. “I’ll have to go to the hardware to get some more pipe.”

“More pipe?” she asked.

“To put in the stack,” he said, and she said, “Oh, right, of course,” as if he’d been talking nuclear physics or microbiology.

You don’t win a woman by putting your hands up her toilet, Donny thought in the truck. You’re not going to win the woman anyway, he thought. You never win the woman. Some guys always do, some guys never. He wasn’t going to impress her by cleaning out her drain or fixing her floor either. If he had any brains at all, he’d charge her plumber’s rates and walk away, not worry about it. He drove to the hardware and picked up his supplies, then back to his shed for the rodder. When he got back to the house they were gone, but Julia had left him a note. So he let himself in by the back door, rigged up a temporary work-light near the pipes, and set to work.

Julia returned around noon. Donny found her in the kitchen awkwardly clutching four white plastic grocery bags while Matthew squirmed in her arms. He reached to take the child but hesitated because of his filthy hands, and Julia nearly dropped everything, sank gracelessly to the floor, and let the child climb off her. Julia’s mother was right beside her,
obsessively picking at something on her hand. Julia’s face was hard with tension.

“Fallowfields is going to take my mother back,” she said once she stood up. “Tomorrow. Which will be fine, right, Mom?” she said, turning finally to face her.

Julia’s mother said, “I think I have to get rid of it, otherwise I’ll never get out.”

“How’s the drain?” Julia asked Donny.

So Donny gave her a complete account. While he talked he was conscious that not only were his hands filthy, but his clothes reeked and his face was probably smeared with grease. He told her about installing the stack, about rodding out the pipe, about how for a while he’d thought the pipe had collapsed after all, which was common enough in the fall with the ground freezing and thawing, shifting around. But it wasn’t that. He told her about pulling up wad after wad of toilet paper and rags jammed with hair. She didn’t seem to know what to say. “If you have some green garbage bags,” he said, “I’ll just bag it up and throw it out for you.” But she wanted to see it, so he showed her. She brought Matthew down, left him to play for a moment in the hamper in the laundry room, then followed Donny into the gloom by the furnace, where he’d installed the drain stack. He was hoping she’d take notice of the way he’d rigged up his own light, since there wasn’t one back in this corner, and of the rodder. She might not realize that most general handymen didn’t have one in their power-tool collections. But he was invisible again. She just stood over the plastic tub and looked at the hairy paper and didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know if somebody got a haircut, or what,” Donny said. “But if you could get some green garbage bags …”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said sharply.

“You don’t want me to clean it up?”

“Oh, that. Oh yes, please. If you could,” she said, and then she turned around and walked off, came back in a minute with the green garbage bags.

“Sometimes these things just accumulate,” Donny said. “There’s a lot of grease, too, lining the pipes. You might try putting coffee grounds down the drain. Anyway, its clear now.” His voice trailed off. She didn’t seem to be listening. She just kept looking at the hairy filth in the garbage bag. Finally she straightened up.

“You’re right,” she said. “Sometimes things just accumulate.”

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