What They Wanted (13 page)

It broadened my heart, that nuzzling of brows. And yet, how fleeting the moment had been. Within a heartbeat Mother was fussing over the teapot having cooled, ushering Gran back to her chair to finish her dinner, scolding me gently for getting jam on my dress—rendering the nuzzling one of those things that mothers do without thinking, like patting a loaf of bread before slicing it.

I wondered now if Mother remembered that moment, and if so, how her account of it might differ from mine, and if so, which of us had knowingly or unknowingly played editor, rewriting a more desirable ending for a more palatable self. Where, then, does truth go?

An illness crept into my stomach. What of memory is truth? It was a staggering thought, and for a moment I felt a great fear, like those split seconds sometimes upon awakening when all sense of self is still caught back in the nether world of sleep and the eyes alone are opened onto the blankness of a room without memory. I clutched my arms around myself, needing to feel the solidity of flesh and bone, like the ghosts from Cooney Arm whose lives have been vanquished into time, leaving behind fragments of soul clinging to wood, no longer knowing what, if anything, is real, and frightened of their invisibility.

The air was becoming cool, my legs tiring from the long walk. I started back to the hospital, quivering a little, as though the bones that had formed within me were transmuting back to the pliability of youth, faltering beneath the rigidity I’d been sculpting upon them during the past years.

WHEN I RETURNED
Mother and Suze had gone for lunch and it was Chris visiting with Father, who sat stiffly now in a chair beside his bed. With his crop of black hair somewhat fashioned into place and his hospital johnny-coat replaced by the blue-striped pyjamas he wore at home during cold nights, Father was looking less like a corpse and even sounding a bit like himself as he asked in a rough, wheezy voice about his boat, the wind, the ice, groaning his displeasure as I scolded him about his worrying.

“You’ll need your moaning for when you gets out and can’t find your paddles,” I said, my fingers combing his hair affectionately. “Mom told him she’s burning them,” I said to Chris. “Said she’s gonna lay Father out in his boat like it was a cradle, and moor it off the kitchen window.”

Chris smiled stiffly, his colour resembling the morning’s porridge.

“Have to sell the boat,” said Father.

I jolted, as surprised by the urgency in his tone as by the statement itself.

“She thinks I don’t know,” he went on, his voice falling into a whisper. “I heard them. Outside the curtain. Not allowed back in the woods.” He shook his head over our splutters of protest.

“You don’t worry about nothing,” blurted Chris, “I’ll take care of the truck till you gets on your feet—” He stopped, silenced by a silvery bead of water swelling out of the corner of Father’s eye.

I hand-scrubbed Father’s head. “Turned down,” I sniffed. “You’ll be back on your feet and working in no time, you know it. You don’t listen to them, Dad. And I got money enough saved—stop looking like that,” I cried as Father cringed beneath my words, his shame burning through his skin. “You’ve done for us all these years, it’s our turn now to do something for you, will you let us?”

He shook his head weakly and I fell silent, feeling like a tyrant youngster trampling over his sick heart, and he too weak to lift me off.

Chris leaned forward in his chair, then back, grasping at his knees while he stared at Father, as though resisting the urge to touch him. He raised his eyes to mine, sharing the wretched secret he was carrying in his heart. But this father who had borne our growing years with gentleness, who had put aside his own passions and hurt for our own well-being, was not about to be abandoned. I felt the conflict in my brother’s heart, I saw the resolve in his eyes.

“
I
’
LL SEE YOU TOMORROW
,” Chris said as I walked him to the parking lot around noon. He dug out the keys to Father’s truck, a brand-new 1980 Chevy Silverado, and unlocked the door, letting out that newish smell of vinyl and leather as he swung it open. “Tomorrow,” he repeated, hushing my need to talk, “we’ll see about things tomorrow.”

He drove off, a sense of urgency to the tilt of his head as he leaned over the wheel, shading his eyes with the visor, pulling abruptly onto the city street. A gleam of sunshine from the roof of the cab and he was lost from sight amidst the city traffic, leaving me with a pounding headache and a sudden desire to be sitting beside him rather than facing another long day with Mother.

I turned wearily back to the hospital. I’d be flying back to Alberta the next morning and wanted to spend as much time as possible with Father. Thankfully, Suze was still about, although she spent the greater part of the day shopping, leaving Mother and me to ourselves.

“Ben never did come much—after he left,” I said to Mother. “How come—Suze sure dotes on him.”

“Doted too much,” said Mother.

“How so?” I asked.

Mother was tidying the sitting room from where we had spent the night. She shook her head to my questioning, passing me the flannel sheets to fold.

“Well, then?” I pushed, unable to curb my curiosity about Ben.

“Well, then, nothing,” said Mother. “She was just too
smothering
is all.”

“Too
smothering
?”

Mother tried to brush aside her words. “I don’t know, Sylvie. She was always at him, hovering—always trying to nurse him. He was a big youngster, and she still kept trying to force the breast on him. I remembers him now, gagging. Yes, she was silly like that,” Mother replied to my growing look of distaste. “Almost four—near school age—when she finally stopped trying to force the breast on him. Shh.” Mother looked to the door as if Suze might be standing there, and lowered her voice. “Now, don’t you go talking about this.”

“I won’t. Gawd, no wonder Ben never wants to talk to her.”

“Not that she done it regularly,” said Mother. “When he was sick, that’s how she used to try and comfort him. He was always sickish with asthma, and went to sleep on a snowbank once. That’s how she found him, sleeping in the snowbank, his face starting to cover over with snow. She thought he was dead and she never got over it.”

“Gawd,” I repeated, unable to get past the wretched image of Ben being smothered against his mother’s breasts, gagging against her nipples.

“He was handled too much,” Mother whispered, and then moved away as a nurse came into the room.

I meant to ask Mother more about Ben and Suze but was kept busy after that, with Father being moved from emergency to a room on the ward. For the rest of the day our attention was focused on him—bathing him, shaving him, trimming his dark, shaggy brows, stuffing minty breath fresheners into his mouth (he hated them), doing his toenails, his fingernails. No doubt our conversation from the night before dogged our steps, but there were moments when we moved as one around Father’s bed. It felt nice. It was the first time I’d known Mother and me to stand side by side, working together. Always there’d been Gran, the boys, Father, and always Mother’s daunting fortitude as she held things together, as she might see it. Easy enough when all things concerned were within her arm’s reach. But here, now, was a different kettle of fish. Father’s near death had forced her to stretch further than the confines of her own doorstep, and I felt her unease about what tomorrow would bring, about the uncertainty of this road newly laid out before her.

And I felt the silent look of appeal in her eyes as she walked me to the parking lot and hugged me goodbye. She complained about my going back to Alberta in the morning, looking so vulnerable that I felt the same resolve well up inside of me as Chris had felt earlier with Father—to make sure that things would be okay, that I would make them okay.

Giving her one final, cheery wave, I started towards the car. Already I was impatient to begin tomorrow’s journey back to Alberta, to the extra hours of work I’d take on and the pocket-loads of tips I’d be counting out and sending home.

“
AND SO HE
’
S GETTING ON
. Good, and so should we, then,” said Gran over a late supper that evening. Chris, I noted, was unnaturally chatty, his shoulders no longer slumped as they’d been yesterday, the same burning fever in his eyes as when he’d left Father at the hospital. Wolfing down his potatoes and sopping up the gravy with bread, he chided Kyle, “Come on, come on, eat up.”

“There’s a band playing at the club tonight and we’re going,” he said to me, sucking on a chicken bone.

He balked as I slapped his hand from his mouth, ordering him to go wipe the grease off his chin. “And I’m not going to no club,” I declared, getting up and scraping my plate onto Gran’s.

“Yeah, we’re going,” he said. “Least you can do on your last night home, go out and see some people.”

“Go—ready yourself,” said Gran. “I can manage a few dishes.”

“Ohh, I can’t stand crowds, Gran, you know that.” I dropped a handful of cutlery into the sink, turned on the taps, and squeezed dish detergent into the running water. “Pass me your fork,” I ordered Chris. “Ky, you finished? Sit down, Gran, let me pour you some tea, you still like it cold?”

I poured Gran’s tea into a tumbler part filled with cold water and then started rinsing the glasses, half reassured, half worried by Chris’s frenetic mood change as he kept yakking about the dance. We hadn’t had an opportunity to speak alone yet, to plan for the days ahead, and so despite my reluctance, after the kitchen was cleared away and Gran tucked into her rocker with her knitting and her lamp lit, I allowed him to persuade me into my coat and boots and out the door.

The sky was still bright outside, the trees gathering darkness. My foot slipped on the muddied trail—a shortcut to Hampden leading up through the woods behind the house. “I don’t wanna go to the damn bar, Chris. Let’s just go for a walk, we need to talk.”

“For an hour,” he said, “and then we’ll talk. Come on,” he coaxed, “and watch the stairs—they’re slippery, too.”

I grunted, scraping the mud off my boots on the half-rotted bottom step. They were a series—about three or four sets—of little stairways that Father had built over the steepest part of the trail so’s to shorten our walk to the school up Hampden. With crooked hand railings made from stripped juniper and pieces of plank bridging the muddied, levelled spots, those stairs were always the best part of coming or going to school, whether it was fear or excitement edging my step. I paused beside a brook all throaty with roots, choking its way through the underbrush down the hillside, and stood for a moment, the air minty cool upon my skin. I looked down at the sea. It was bluish black in the half light of evening, fretting amongst the rocks on shore, with the steeply wooded hills appearing as darkened humps against the sky—like shoulders, I thought, great mammoth shoulders of the earth settling into sleep. What I ought to be doing.

“Lose your way?” called Chris from above.

“Oh, just keep going,” I muttered, and paused again at a rustling from below. Kyle’s head popped through the brush.

“Thought you were staying with Gran,” I said.