• Chapter 32 •

They sent Roseanna to the General in Regina, the same hospital where Bill Rawling died. Mac will visit her, but first he has a favour to ask of Esther. He has pieced together Roseanna’s doll with epoxy. But it needs clothes.

“Now you’re a dear thing to fix that doll,” Esther says as she pours Mac’s tea. “The plastic’s stained from all those years sitting out in a junk pile, and it looks like a big scar across her middle where you’ve patched her together…but a nice dress will cover that up.”

“It’s what I thought,” Mac says.

“The road’s okay with all this snow?”

“Forecast says sunny tomorrow, and Abner’s coming with me. He says the NDP Executive is meeting at Tommy Douglas House tomorrow, and he’ll stop in there while I visit Roseanna.”

She’s in a room with four beds, each one enclosed in curtains. Mac hesitates at the open doorway.

“Roseanna?”

Glen steps forward to meet him. Angela sits in a chair beside the bed, along with Charlotte and the children.

“I wonder if I could talk to your mother?” Mac asks. Glen looks to his wife, and to Angela, and he says something in Cree. Charlotte answers in Cree.

“We’ll leave you,” Glen says. “Charlotte says there’s a Robin’s Donuts on the main floor. We’ll go for coffee.”

Mac pulls up a chair and sits close. Roseanna appears to be sleeping. A tube hangs from a stand, dripping liquid into her left arm. Another tube leads to her nose. A monitor shows a green zigzag line. Mac watches for any movement on Roseanna’s face, and he hears the gurgle of her breathing.

“Can you hear me, Roseanna?” He touches her on the wrist. “Can you hear me? It’s Chorniak.”

Her head moves ever so slightly, and her eyelids flutter but her eyes stay closed.

“The picnic. Maybe we should have picked a better day….”

Her eyelids flutter once more, and her head bends forward, her lips moving with just a breath of a voice:

“That damned owl, eh?” Her head falls back, and Mac detects a trace of a smile.

“Do you mind if I take a drink of your water? My throat is kinda dry.”

She nods.

“There’s something more I gotta say. I don’t know if I should be speaking for the others, but I do know they’re worried. It’s not out of mind for them. I’d like to think they are sorry. I sure am. I’ve already told you that, but I’ll say it again. I’m sorry.”

Roseanna’s eyes open, but they look away. Her lips move, her mouth opening as she tries to talk again. Mac offers up her water glass; inserts the straw into her mouth as she attempts to drink.

“We were drunk with homebrew, but that’s no excuse. We did it. We killed Thomas. All of us.”

Her head moves slowly back and forth. She grimaces, then nods slowly up and down.

“For me the only court that matters now is yours.”

The fingers of her right hand pat the mattress, and then they clench and unclench to pat again.

“I brought it,” Mac says. He reaches into his pocket. “The duck.”

Both Mac and Roseanna grimace, but just for the moment. He opens her hand and places the duck in it. He closes her fingers. Roseanna’s eyes close, and they stay closed. Her breathing seems more relaxed, and it gurgles only intermittently.

“And one more thing.” He taps her on the arm. “You still awake?” He taps again. “Roseanna?” Her arm moves.

“Can you open your eyes just once more?” He doesn’t know exactly how to say this, but there is something he feels they have to do together, something they did once long ago.

“Can you look at me, Roseanna?”

Her fingers let go of the duck, and she lifts her arm to point to the bedside table.

“You’d like some more water?” She shakes her head. Her hand goes to the plastic line clipped to her nose, and then she points to the table again and back to her nose. She points again to the oxygen mask on the bedside table. She wants a heavier dose of oxygen. He connects the oxygen-mask line to the outlet on the wall above her head and sets the gauge to maximum. Mac holds the mask to Roseanna’s face. She breathes in and out several times, then waves her hand to lift the mask away.

“I don’t look into people’s eyes,” she says. “Just owls.”

“Just for one moment, please? Can you?”

“Why?”

“Something I have to find out.”

“One moment only,” she says, and their eyes meet.

“That’s all it was, Roseanna. One moment only. A long time ago on the eve of sports day. I won the kewpie doll at the milk-bottle toss, and you looked at me when I gave it to you. You looked at me just for a moment. Later that night I walked around the racetrack three times hoping I’d see you to have that moment again.”

“Eh?”

“It’s nothing, really. Only that moment.”

“Three times around the track?”

“One moment only.”

“That we had? You and me? I forgot about it all these years. And here I threw that broken doll at you.”

“I fixed it.”

Mac lifts her hand and places the doll in her open palm.

“A star-blanket dress,” Roseanna says, and her eyes fill with tears. Her eyes then lock onto Mac’s, and his eyes fill with tears. Roseanna’s lips move, as if trying to form words, but nothing comes. She lifts the hand that holds the duck. Slowly her hands move up and down, making it seem that the two relics dance. Finally, her hands drop to her sides and she coughs. A nurse appears and applies Roseanna’s oxygen mask back onto her face.

“No more visiting,” the nurse says. “She needs rest.”

“I’m leaving now,” Mac says. “You need rest, Roseanna. Rest.”

She pulls off the mask. The nurse attempts to put it back on, but Roseanna waves her away. She looks one final time at Mac and says, “You’re a good man, Chorniak.”