They didn’t speak on the drive back from the county office to Prairie View. Billy could almost feel sorry for Nick—the photos were gross—except that Nick was rude and unlikeable and too full of himself. A loser.
His grandma was not in her room, which was weird. Where else would she be? He poked his head next door. Rachel Moss sat in the chair beside her comatose mother, thumbing through a magazine. She wore a psychedelic blazer of crazy shapes and swirls, the only burst of colour in that ugly room.
“Have you seen Grandma?” he asked.
“Don’t think so.” She lifted her magazine and scanned under it. “Not here.”
He laughed. She had an odd sense of humour.
“Keep looking,” she said. “She can’t have escaped. Check closets and under beds.”
He wandered down the hall, peering in open doors. He was starting to recognize some of their faces, even talked to a few people, the same conversation each time, I’ve got potatoes to peel, or I just love the birds, or Where do you come from? or Have you seen my Caroline?
He found Evie in the dining room with a handful of others. They were at the big table wearing plastic bibs, small paint pots scattered about. They each had a wooden tulip in front of them on a piece of cardboard. The woman handing out paintbrushes turned and stared.
“Can I help you?” she asked, as if he had wandered in off the street.
“Evie is my grandma.”
“Oh.” She looked from one blank face to another. “Which one is Evie?”
Billy pointed to his grandma, whose eyes lit up. She blew him a kiss.
The woman said, “I’m only in once a week, and they come and go so fast, I haven’t got their names straight. I think this is Evie’s first time.”
“She just moved here.”
“Well, take a seat beside your grandma. You can help her use her brush. We’re painting tulips this morning. I’m Jennifer. The rec aide. I’ll get you one.”
It reminded him of a kindergarten class, minus one iota of enthusiasm. No one spoke except Jennifer, who barked out orders cheerfully—hold it like a pencil, that’s it, a little more paint, no, no, no, dear, not near your mouth. They kept their heads down, hunched over their tulips, swiping tiny dabs of paint on the same spot over and over.
His grandma had put hers aside. She fixated on her cardboard piece, as good a canvas as any. While she only had one brush and a few colours, she went straight to work, her face scrunched in concentration, which made him feel both hopeful and sad. She used long bold brush strokes, sweeping down and curving back up again.
“She’s supposed to paint the tulip, not the cardboard,” Jennifer told him. “Why don’t you show her how it’s done?”
Billy ignored her, and dipping his brush into red, zigzagged across his cardboard until the paint petered out. He’d work out a frame for the graphic novel he’d been fiddling with all year. Fig standing on top of his planet, a rocky orb not much bigger than him, shouting at the universe to stop spinning.
They continued their projects wordlessly. One of the men painted his tulip black, leaves and all, the tips of his fingers sticky with paint. The tiny woman held onto her doll while she painted orange freckles on her piece of wood, which smeared onto her elbow. Another woman asked if she could go back to her room, which caused Jennifer to sigh before nodding.
His grandma worked quickly, the blues now a shoreline of rounded rocks, an ocean lapping against them, the sky splashes of red blended into milky white. He admired how she used colour to create depth and movement, the world she imagined when she held a brush. She had tried to teach him to trust in the process, but he’d never have a fraction of her talent.
Jennifer circled the room, asking people their names, printing them with felt pen on the backs of their art pieces before setting them on the window ledge to dry. She helped each with their bibs, telling them they could go, reminding them she’d be back next week to make kites to hang in their windows.
When Jennifer got around to his grandma, she stared at their painted cardboard without saying a word. Evie’s painting could go straight into some fancy art gallery. Billy didn’t mind his either. He’d gotten Fig’s mad terror just right, a look he usually had trouble with.
“My grandma’s an artist,” he said, stating the obvious. “She doesn’t need our help.”
“Well, I can see that. Your work is good too.” Jennifer’s cheeks flushed. They’d disrupted her chain of command, which seemed to upset her. “But finish up now. The table needs to be set for lunch.”
As the black-tulip man shuffled out the door, she yelled, “Stop right there. You have to take off your paint smock. And you use a walker, don’t you?” She marched out after him, dragging a walker, leaving Billy and his grandma alone.
“I like your painting, Grandma.” He put his hand over hers.
She put down her brush and turned to him, “Oh, hello, Billy,” she said. She stared at her seascape. “Did you paint this?”
“No. You did. Just now. You just finished.”
“Really.” She scrutinized the work more closely. “There’s not enough reflection. Here and here.” She reached for the orange pot, but Billy put his hand on her shoulder.
“Sorry. We have to call it quits. They need this table for lunch. Are you hungry?”
She looked about the room, the strange fridge and sink, clearly not her own. “What have we got, Billy? Is there leftover chicken?”
“We don’t have to cook today,” he said. As he helped Evie to her feet, Sarah pushed in a cart stacked with dishes and cutlery and jugs full of water.
“Evie went to art class. That’s so great,” Sarah said, leaving her cart and coming close. “So which of these flowers is yours.” She peered down at their work, eyes wide, hand over her heart. “You painted these? In this class?”
“We disobeyed the teacher,” Billy laughed. “No tulips for us.”
“A+ for the pair of you. Let me guess. This one is Evie’s. And this one’s yours.”
“Yep.”
“It makes me want to know the whole story, Billy. Like who is this guy standing on this rock in the middle of space, and what’s he yelling, and who is he yelling at? It’s really something, and Evie, your work is extraordinary. It needs a frame and your signature. I’m blown away. I wish you could paint every wall in this place in these bright, bold colours.”
“Really?” Billy stared at Sarah as she gathered paint pots.
“Of course, really,” she said.
“You think we should paint the walls?”
She pointed to the wall with a handful of brushes. “It looks like it’s been dunked in pea soup. They all do.”
“We could, you know,” Billy said. “Paint the walls.”
Sarah laughed. “Good. And while you’re at it, do something with the door at the end of the hallway. Make it look like something else so our residents quit bashing into it, trying to get out. No offence, Evie. I know you don’t bash into doors.”
“Like paint a scene, you mean? Like a flowerbed or hillside or something?”
“Why not?” Sarah scrubbed off the table’s paint splotches with lightning efficiency. “A barnyard of chickens. Pigs, even.”
“I could do that.” Billy felt lighter than he had in weeks. “Grandma will help.”
“Well, take it up with the big cheese,” Sarah said. “Whoever that is this month. Lewis Clifton, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Maybe I will.” Billy waved as he ushered Evie out, his mind swirling with colour, the designs they might choose.
Sarah sat beside Edith, sneaking a minute between chores to help her sort through photos. A man’s shouts boomed down the hall. That would be Harvey; someone must have taken his chair again.
Sarah sprinted towards the racket. Ruth had planted herself in the middle chair in front of the dining room, Harvey spread-legged in front of her. Ruth must have pulled her hearing aids out again, which was just as well. Head down, she was oblivious to Harvey’s building rage as she pulled Kleenexes from her purse, building a mountain range of craggy white peaks on her lap.
Sarah put a hand on Harvey’s arm, which caused him to yell in her face, “That woman is in my seat. She’s not supposed to be there. I bought a ticket.”
Harvey had been a train conductor his entire career. Always waiting for a train, always worried he’d miss it. Sarah smiled. “We can get a cup of coffee before the train pulls up. Let’s go find one, shall we? You have lots of time.”
As she manoeuvred Harvey away from Ruth, Dorothy lumbered down the hall, the type of woman who could stay upright in a hurricane, hands on hips, trees and cars hurling about.
“Good again, Harvey?” Dorothy asked, though his upset had evaporated the second both the chair, and the woman on it, were out of his view. “Really, I could hear you bellowing all the way from my office.”
“These encounters can be like runaway trains,” Sarah whispered, hoping for a smile that never materialized. “I thought Harvey and I could grab a coffee.”
Dorothy scowled. “I’ll deal with Harvey. You’re needed in the Moss room. Rachel is on the warpath again. Her mother’s sheets are wet.”
Sarah knew only a little. The care aids liked to gossip, and those who grew up in these parts said the Mosses were a family to be avoided. Mr. Moss was known to sit in a burnt-out armchair in his front yard, case of beer at his feet, a tub of Stoker’s snuff on his lap, pellet gun under his arm, pointed at the trees. He had a distrust of birds. And dogs and kids and anything that made noise. Whenever he clipped a magpie or a crow, he’d hang it upside down from a tree branch, a family of cadavers swinging in the breeze. Mrs. Moss had been seldom seen around town, but on summer nights, her screaming at her husband carried through children’s open windows and into their nightmares.
Rachel was the Mosses’ only child, surprising the whole town with her recent return. She’d fled Rigsbee decades ago, when she was not yet sixteen and well before she graduated from school. To where, no one could say. Mary, one of the kitchen staff, remembered her from elementary school. She was a ghost, invisible, skin and bone. She got caught sleeping in the janitor’s closet when she should have been at recess. Caught stealing sandwich scraps and half-eaten apples from the lunchroom’s garbage. The child never uttered a word, never showed a hint of enthusiasm for field trips or sports days or school dances. Her singular claim to fame involved an incident in Mrs. Mitchell’s grade two class when she was called to the blackboard to print the day’s secret story word. She stood there rigid, her back to her classmates, hands squeezed by her side. Everyone fidgeted, waiting for Rachel to lift the chalk, until finally someone yelled, Teacher! Look! They gasped and tittered. A river of yellow snaked down Rachel’s stick leg and puddled on the floor, and yet there she stayed, a melting ice sculpture, until Mrs. Mitchell gingerly pulled her away. They called her Piddle Pants after that.
Sarah hated the gleeful pettiness in the retelling of these stories, and she turned away whenever the gossipers got going. But she couldn’t unhear the snippets or get the pictures out of her head. That skeleton of a child, an outcast, no little girls’ hands to hold, no shoulder to bury into, no homemade cookies or orange wedges in her lunch bag. People must have guessed what had been going on in that home. And no one stepped forward.
She knocked before entering the deathly quiet room. “Morning, Rachel. How’s your mom today?”
Rachel leaned over the bed, dabbing rouge over her mother’s milky cheeks. Victoria Moss had mere days left, weeks at most.
“Never any sense in letting yourself go.” Rachel snapped shut the compact as she surveyed her artistry. Victoria, motionless, lay like a soul lost in the morgue. Rachel herself seemed rosy and robust, everything about her an explosion of eye-popping colour.
“I wish I could do her hair.” She’d arranged her own hair into a sleek upstyle, wisps framing her face, a touch of softness to the polished look.
An ache squeezed Sarah’s chest. Despite the tales of Rachel’s dismal childhood, here she was. She’d been coming to the unit for weeks. Occasionally she took breaks, wandering the halls or stretching in the lunchroom. Mostly, she stood vigil in this sad, lonely room, hour after endless hour.
“I’m a hairdresser,” Rachel said.
Sarah grinned. “Well, that explains it. You always look like you’ve stepped out of a beauty salon.”
“I would have loved to give Mom a perm.”
Sarah shuddered to think of it. Victoria’s perm days were long over, her thinning hair matted to her scalp like wood ash.
“Her sheet is wet again,” Rachel said. “And she stinks. I told Dorothy. If looks could kill! Just because the government subsidizes her bed doesn’t mean she deserves a wet diaper.”
Sarah nodded; families’ finances were none of her business.
“God knows, I couldn’t spring for this 5-star resort.” Rachel scrutinized the oppressive room, forcing air through her nose, a rough harsh sound. “All my father left her was a shitbox house, mine to get rid of.”
Sarah hoped the house sale would give her enough to start over.
“Dorothy must think since it’s not our money, I demand too much.”
“You’re not demanding at all. And we’ll fix her right up. It’s hard to get the diapers snug when she’s so tiny.” Sarah looked between the hearty daughter and the skin-and-bone mother with the sunken rouged cheeks. A karmic reversal had unfolded across the years.
She slipped on disposable gloves and changed the wet diaper. Then she gently rolled the woman to one side of the bed, her body weightless, like turning a page in an ancient book.
“If it’s any consolation, wet is a good sign,” Sarah said. “It means your mother is not dehydrated.” Rachel stood with her arms crossed. Four hands might have been better than two, but she could not blame her for staying on the sidelines.
Sarah removed the wet sheet and laid out the fresh one on the exposed part of the mattress. With Victoria rolled back again onto a waterproof pad, she pulled the sheet taunt and tucked in the edges with hospital corners.
“There we go. Good as new.” Sarah bundled up the dirty linen, pulled her gloves off, and scrubbed her hands. Neither mother nor daughter moved. Neither made a sound. She came back to the bed and rested her palm on Rachel’s back. “She seems comfortable now,” she whispered. “Her breathing is steady, and she’s not in any pain.”
“We weren’t close,” Rachel stated matter of factly. “We hadn’t spoken in decades.”
Sarah was taken aback by her unblinking disclosure. It was as if she believed she didn’t deserve more.
“I’m so sor—”
“Maybe she knows I’m here.”
“Of course she does.”
“How much longer?”
Sarah shook her head helplessly. She wanted to lead Rachel away, feed her warm cookies and milk.
“Will you be doing hair here in Rigsbee, Rachel?”
“Oh,” she said, as if she hadn’t considered it. No wonder, stuck like she was in this wilderness.
“Well, the town would be lucky to have you. You should have your own salon.”
Rachel squinted and pursed her lips, as though imagining her name in lights. Moss Locks. Rachel’s Renewals.
“And you could do makeup too.”
Rachel nodded. “It can be a slippery slope. Stop with the mascara and eyeliner and the next thing you know you’re prancing down the street in sweatpants and no bra.”
“Exactly. We need your flair around here.”
Rachel smiled. A hint of light shone through her, as if a crack in the obstinate wall of death might acknowledge a fresh start.
Sarah had three rooms to finish before lunch. She hadn’t done much for this woman, just a moment of tenderness between them. Sometimes a moment was enough.