The Hour of Bad Decisions (24 page)

The Forrestals left the next morning around eleven, and Margaret left the keys and the credit card slip on the table, as if they might change their minds. The dew was already long gone, the air already heavy again.

And Jack was on the tractor, hauling the big mower up and down the long field between the house and the road, the chaff and dust rising in a cloud behind him. Looking out the kitchen window, she could only see his back and the back of his head, and the deep, dusty vee of sweat down the middle of the back of his t-shirt as he drove away from her. His head didn't move, as if he were completely consumed with the task at hand, as if he could not imagine that there was anything on earth, not one single thing anywhere, beyond grass and hoppers and dust.

Alicia gave an offhand wave as the car pulled around the corner of the house and headed down the driveway. Dan was looking straight ahead at the road, and he didn't turn his head, not even once. Margaret would have noticed if he had.

“Oh,” she moaned to the blind pane of kitchen window glass, to the rooster-tail of roadway dust settling behind the car as it pulled away. “Oh.” And Margaret put her forehead against the glass and cried.

I
AN KINLEY ARRIVED AT THE SEASHELL MOTEL
in a taxi, and that was strange enough.

Settled down on the side of a highway outside Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Seashell was the kind of crumbling motel where you drove in one night, and drove out the next morning.

And that was the second strange thing: Ian wasn't leaving in the morning.

When the clerk asked him “Just tonight?” Ian answered “We'll see,” all the time tapping the edge of his credit card impatiently on the counter.

“Licence number?”

“Nope. No car.”

“Bags?”

“Just this,” and Ian held up a small brown fabric suitcase.

“Unit 14,” the desk clerk said. The new guest was a small man, maybe in his seventies, with a thin,
deeply wrinkled face and white hair. He was wearing a brown jacket and dress pants, much more formal than most guests, who favoured t-shirts, jeans and baseball caps.

Ian walked slowly to his unit, stopping occasionally to breathe deeply and painfully. His doctor had said it was only pleurisy, but Ian thought of it – repeatedly – as the last straw. The pace gave him a chance to look at the units carefully. Each one was the same. Except for the corner units, they shared common walls on both sides, and uniform, greying white stucco on the front. Each had two rectangular windows – one large, one small – underlined with once-jaunty window boxes full of dead or dying flowers. The geraniums were struggling – the pansies had long since died of thirst. There was a parking space in front of each one, with a white number painted on the pavement.

Ian watched the numbers as he walked: eleven, twelve, fourteen. He always found that odd: it was like buildings where there was no thirteenth floor, where the elevator buttons left out one odd number as they climbed. Perhaps the idea was that superstition would make them hard to rent, he thought. But he was pragmatic enough about that: he'd be fine staying in thirteen, whatever they decided to call it.

Inside, the room was like any other – two queen-sized beds with busily patterned bedspreads designed to hide stains, a television with the remote control laid squarely in front of it. He'd turned down the minibar key. He laid his suitcase on the bed near the
window, and walked into the bathroom, flicking on the light. The bathroom, he knew, would back onto another bathroom in the suite next door – another way to save a little money on construction.

Ian looked at himself in the big bathroom mirror, trying to reconcile the person looking back at him with the picture he had of himself. The man in the mirror shook his head resignedly. Ian walked back to the bed and opened the suitcase. Socks, underwear, one clean shirt. He picked up two handfuls of pill bottles, his razor and toothbrush, and went back to the bathroom. He lined the bottles up in front of the glass, next to the two clean, upside-down water glasses.

Doctors like to have you out of their office, he thought. They like to think they've done the right thing, but they also like to be rid of you, rid of your nagging complaints. Old age complaints, he thought, regularly mitigated but never cured.

If you're in your seventies, just go in and tell them you're having trouble sleeping, and they'll get the prescription pad out right away.

Ian looked at the five bottles of pills sitting next to each other. Four to keep me alive, he thought, and one to do something quite different. One to keep his blood thin, one to keep his blood pressure down, another for angina, a fourth, antibiotics for his lungs. And the sleeping pills.

Ian had never had trouble sleeping – nightmares, yes, but sleep had always been like falling off a bridge. A few seconds to ponder the day before you hit the
black water of sleep hard. But he had forty sleeping pills now, big red and yellow capsules, each one, the doctor had assured him “strong enough to put a horse to sleep.”

He left the bathroom, pulled the curtains open.

His room looked out on the parking lot, and across the road, a lobster pound where the overnight refrigerated trucks sat, engines running, waiting for morning and loads of crustaceans. Right in front of his unit in the empty parking space was a huge stain of transmission fluid. Later, when it rained, the pavement there would bead up with shiny, oil-topped drops, each with its own twirling, circling rainbow. The drops dried last, long after the rest of the asphalt had lightened.

Ian met Rosie the afternoon he checked in: he was coming out the door of his unit while she was coming in, the bulky housekeeping cart blocking most of the sidewalk.

Rosie Kirk had dark eyebrows that knotted together constantly, as if she were overwhelmingly concerned. They were at odds with the rest of her wide, open face – Ian noticed that she always smiled when she met someone, as if she felt she owed them a pleasant response. Big across the shoulders, she looked more like a softball player than anything else, and a cheerful one at that. But the eyebrows gave her away, put the lie to the smile.

“Just checking to see if everything's all right,” Rosie said brightly. Ian had yet to even pull back the covers on the bed to see what the pillows were like.
If I dropped my things back in the suitcase, he thought, there'd be no sign I'd been here at all. But that's the way it is with hotels; check in, check out, and vanish without a trace.

“It's fine,” Ian said, smiling back at Rosie. “All I really need.”

At the same time, he wished he hadn't run into the woman. It was too much to put a face to her – he couldn't help imagining, now, what it would be like when Rosie came into the room afterwards. But that was another day, and Ian suddenly realized how hungry he was.

O
UTSIDE THE MOTEL
, he set off down the road, walking on the gravel shoulder, teetering slightly. The ditches were alight with flowers – there were still wild strawberries, he saw, even though he didn't bend down to pick any. Wild strawberries and the bright green of raspberry canes. The tangled strands of wild roses, the flowers still tightly-furled and pink-tipped. Trash in the ditch, too, and Ian couldn't help but try to put together a sort of history for each piece. All stories, he thought, from the candy wrapper some child had dropped out of a car window, to the ripped condom package, its torn edge fluttering in the breeze, to the way the beige timothy grass seeds were coming away from their stalks. That was the one part he regretted: such a waste to collect so much information, so much experience, only to have it turn off like a light bulb.

Sure, the practical stuff carried on – he knew there wasn't anyone who needed to hear from him about how to wire a three-phase electrical plug, or what kind of varnish was right for trim. But there had to be some use for and some way to share the other stuff: the knowledge that the searing part of love can be fleeting, and should be carefully savoured for as long as possible; that wine tastes different in the dark; that every chance you take is electric in its own way, and that its charged tingle is far from unpleasant.

He was at his destination already. In front of him was the sign for the restaurant, an oval sign lined all around with light bulbs:
Mae's
. It was a small restaurant with booths and matronly waitresses in white uniforms, a familiar kind of spot, and Ian realized you could actually see the ocean from most of the tables.

He had a simple meal, clam chowder and a dinner roll. The roll was warm – Ian used both of the small plastic containers of butter, and didn't stop to think about it. He wiped the last of the chowder up with the roll, and felt a great release from doing exactly what he wanted. Then he sat quietly with his coffee – two cream, one sugar – and looked out the restaurant's big windows, across the train tracks and out over the short-chopped waves of Bedford Basin. There was a container ship moored there, swinging on its anchors and stacked high with orange and blue containers. Ian imagined where the big metal containers were going, tried to guess what it was they held.

Leaning back in the cushioned booth, he couldn't remember being more comfortable. I'll wait one
more day, he thought. One more day. Nothing wrong with eating clam chowder two days in a row.

Soon, it was five days in a row, and the staff was saying they couldn't remember the last time a guest had stayed so long. Ian was almost a fixture by then, walking down the road on rainy days, sitting by the pool when it was sunny. He had convinced the taxi company to deliver beer right to his unit, the driver always careful to look both ways, up and down the highway, before getting out of the taxi with the six-pack.

By Wednesday, six days and counting, it looked like he might not ever leave.

That afternoon, in the early July heat, the desk-clerk – his real name was Doug, but by then Ian knew everyone called him Bud – was swinging a hockey stick through the grass behind the motel, taking the heads off dandelions and knocking them away across the grass. Bumblebees were droning slowly in circles, and Bud was taking his time. It was two o'clock in the afternoon, and Bud knew no one would be checking in for hours – it would be five o'clock at the earliest when the first of the exhausted all-day drivers would flop their chubby forearms down on the counter and tug wallets out of their too-tight jeans.

Ian watched the heat shimmer up off the pool deck, and reached into the box for another beer.

“You could put them in ice,” Bud shouted over to him. “Ice machine's fixed.”

“That's all right,” Ian called back. “Don't mind them warm. Want one?”

“No, Mr. K.,” Bud said, taking aim at another dandelion and winding the hockey stick back for another slap shot. “I'm working, remember?”

By then, Ian had realized that travellers stayed at the Seashell so they could get up with the sun for an early start on the road. The housekeeping staff often forgot to reset the clock radios after guests checked out, but no one complained. Five-thirty in the morning was always time to go.

Heavy trucks would overnight in the back lot, their drivers in the bar down the road until closing. There were campers looking for one night with a bathroom and shower before going back to roughing it, and pickup trucks loaded with furniture – almost always on the thirtieth of the month – their owners in the process of moving to new apartments. Those were the standard guests.

The Seashell was convenient, clean, cheap and on the way – but it was never going to be a holiday destination, despite the pool the owners had installed a few years earlier. The only swimmers in the pool were June bugs and flying ants, doing marathon back-strokes, supported by surface tension until they finally expired.

Ian's pool chair was the only one that was set up – a stack of folded chairs sat at the end of the pool nearest to the back of the motel, tied in place with frayed yellow nylon rope. The tops of the chairs were worn to a matte white from the weather. Ian could feel a slick of sweat forming where his body touched the vinyl straps of the chair.

For Ian, the warm beer held its own alchemy, and it fired its own set of memories, taking him back to the backyard behind his Halifax house. Just sitting on the porch, sipping beer, watching the evening fade away into the steady orange glow of the streetlights. Watching the peonies blossom, big fat buds that opened rich, and then bent face down, embarrassed. You had to be careful with peonies, Ian thought, too much damp early and the buds get fungus and die. He wondered how they were doing there without him.

It's only a cab ride away, he thought, but it could just as well be in another country. He walked through the checklist in his head. He'd turned the breakers off for the hot water heater so the electrical bill would be lower. Car cleaned out, locked and left in the driveway. All of the garbage cans were emptied, the litter box cleaned, the big green bag out by the curb before he left. He had left a careful note right where they would find it, on the table inside the back door. He had even thought about bagging up his clothes for the Good Will, but had reconsidered. That seemed almost too carefully planned.

Better for them to have something to do to work through it all, he had thought at the time. He hoped someone would adopt Tip from the spca. He didn't like the idea of the cat being put down, but it was that or just leave him outside, and doing that seemed far more cruel. He'd told the workers that he was going into an old age home, that Tip was healthy and well behaved and friendly. He didn't tell them that Tip loved killing birds, and that Ian had once seen the cat,
leaping, pick a robin clean out of the sky. After that, he had kept Tip inside the house for two weeks, feeling complicit.

Ian was proud of the house, even thinking about it now. He'd done a lot of work to make it just the way he wanted: whoever bought it would obviously do whatever they liked, but he preferred to think some parts – like the wainscoting – would live on, perhaps through a number of owners. He had pieced that wainscoting together carefully, not by any means a carpenter, but having the advantage of time. He'd measure a piece, put it up, and if it didn't look exactly right, he'd either take it down again, or stop until the next day, to see how the work looked to fresh eyes.