Caroline shifts uncomfortably in her bed and flaps her blanket so it snaps like a sheet in the wind then looks at the clock radio on the nightstand. Eight thirty-two. They’ve turned out the lights, but her room glows in a pale wash of lingering daylight, bright enough to read if she could only swing her legs over the edge of the bed, stand up, and reach for the book on the side table by her chair. She has no patience for the strict rules in this place. How do they expect her to sleep when it won’t be dark for hours?
Eldon was an early riser, up at dawn each day, even when the time changed at daylight savings. He always complained when they had to adjust the clocks, saying the concept was unnecessary, designed for the leisurely pursuits of city people, not farmers who worked in tandem with the rising and setting of the sun and not the hands of a clock. He insisted on a full breakfast so Caroline was drawn from her warm bed, too, frying eggs and ham or bacon as the sun poked over the horizon. At first, after he died, she’d still felt the need to spring out of bed once her rocking chair in the corner began to take shape in dawn’s tender light. But she soon realized she could linger if she chose, settle her head back on the pillow like she used to when she was a teenager and her mother indulged her on Saturday mornings. Her father used to huff about it; she could hear him in the kitchen telling her mother Caroline should be up, helping with chores, but her mother would shush him and say, “Let her sleep.”
Even now, Caroline feels a timorous squeeze on her heart whenever she thinks of her mother. Dead more than sixty years and yet she can still see her standing in the kitchen, whisking a thick batter while the sun opened its sleepy eye. She has surpassed her mother’s age by nearly thirty years, in robust health the whole time until she slipped on the stairs. When she turned fifty-two, she marvelled at how young she still felt and she wondered why she had ever considered her mother an old woman at that age. Had her mother, despite her tired eyes and work-worn body, still felt like she did, young and so full of life inside?
Charity, the night-duty nurse, trundles by, those horrid plastic clogs she wears clapping against the floor. She backs up and looks into Caroline’s room. “Not sleeping yet?”
Who can bloody well sleep when you’ve put us to bed earlier than a bunch of eight-year-olds? Caroline wants to say it but she knows she must be polite, especially to this inaptly named beast of a woman. She once saw Charity pinch Simon Tuttle in the dining room when he’d purposely knocked his dinner plate on the floor.
“Would you like me to give you something to help you sleep?” Charity looms over her and Caroline can smell the nurse’s oniony breath.
Caroline shakes her head and is tempted to hold her two hands crossed over her mouth the way Becca used to when she tried to give her a teaspoon of Buckley’s. She won’t be fooled into swallowing one of those little pills Charity feeds to residents like Simon or Joe so she can sit at the desk doing crosswords all night.
“Could I have my book? Perhaps if I read for a while I’ll get sleepy.”
“Lights out means lights out and rules are rules.” Charity fills a glass with water, leaves it on Caroline’s nightstand, and waddles out of the room.
Caroline closes her eyes. If Addie were on duty, she’d give Caroline the book. She doesn’t always bother with the rules. Caroline has seen her passing Martha Gudz an extra dish of ice cream and racing out the door with John McTavish in his wheelchair when those four big red combines of Three Oaks Farms roar by, just so he can see them and be reminded of his own days on the farm. She’s always soft-spoken with residents like Simon and Joe. What good does it do to get angry with someone like that? Thank God for small graces. She might not be able to stand up and reach for her book, but at least she can read and she knows her own name. That’s one thing she thinks about so often now: the different ways to live and the different ways to die. She wants to go quickly when the time comes.
Two weeks was all it took when Eldon died. It was the spring of his seventy-eighth year. He’d had congestive heart failure for years, growing weaker and weaker as time went on, struggling to breathe, until he collapsed while eating breakfast one day. Caroline called the ambulance and followed in her car to the hospital. Day by day he failed, until all he did was sleep. Caroline sat at his bedside, watching the rise and fall of his sunken chest, holding her breath when he did, long seconds where she thought it was over, that she might be free to go home, until he gasped and started up again. On a few occasions he called out Becca’s name. Caroline leaned in close, whispering into his ear. “Do you know, Eldon? Do you know where she is?”
Eldon and Elvina had always known of Becca’s whereabouts and they kept it from Caroline like a pair of conspirators, even when she cried and begged them to tell her. It was Elvina who insisted they send Becca away; she was the one who came up with the plan and came over to pack Becca’s things. She told Caroline that Becca wanted nothing to do with her. And besides, the shame of Becca’s illegitimate child would tarnish their good name, Elvina said, so it was decided that the baby would be put up for adoption; Caroline’s first grandchild given away like an unwanted puppy and raised by complete strangers on the farthest edge of the country.
There was an aunt in Victoria, a sister of Elvina’s by the name of Irene, whom Caroline had never met. She guessed that’s where Becca was sent. Irene had escaped her hard-scrabble life on the farm by boarding a train in the twenties and riding it over the Rockies until she came to the ocean, settling there, never to return to the prairies. As far as Caroline knew, Irene had never married. With the help of a persistent telephone operator, she called every Farr in the book until a woman, who she could have sworn was Elvina — so similar was the haughty voice of Aunt Irene — answered the phone. No, Rebecca was not there, Irene told her each time she called. Caroline assumed Irene was lying to her, purposely keeping her from speaking to Becca on orders from Elvina, perhaps. She called for weeks, always getting the same denial, and finally Caroline screamed at the woman, demanding to speak to her daughter, but Irene refused. The next day, the number was disconnected, the new number unlisted, and she never spoke to Irene over the telephone again. But she always remembered Irene’s words before she last hung up the phone.
“Rebecca doesn’t want to speak to you. You’ve destroyed her life and she wants nothing to do with you. You’re dead to her. Now leave us alone.”