A NURSE SHOWED FLOSSY into the dimly lit room and asked her, kindly, not to disturb the body. The coroner hadn’t arrived yet, she explained, and they would still need to take more blood samples.
Mealie lay large on a hospital gurney. The paramedics or emergency room doctors had cut her clothing from the neck down the front to her waist and there she lay, her big-hearted chest fully exposed. One of her arms was outstretched with an intravenous connection still attached to a vein. Flossy took a sheet crumpled at the foot of the gurney and pulled it up, right up to Mealie’s neck. She didn’t much care who she disturbed. She stared at Mealie’s pale skin, her open mouth. There was nothing dignified about death. Flossy licked her thumb and gently rubbed a streak of charcoal from Mealie’s cold forehead. She placed a gentle hand on the top of her curly grey hair, leaned her own forehead against Mealie’s temple and wept there in utter silence.
After a few minutes, she straightened herself, caught her breath and wiped her own tears from Mealie’s lifeless face. Flossy collected her things, walked out of the room and closed the door.
She checked her watch on her way back to the car. There was time to get home before the others. “Dear God, dear God. Mealie.” A soft drizzle was still in the air.
She wouldn’t even remember the drive home, later on, only that she’d had to pull off the road once, to lean against the steering wheel and cry like a baby in the privacy of old Falstaff. Turning up the Station Road, she couldn’t bear to look at Mealie’s house. Stepping back into her own, Flossy was flooded by the emptiness. The fire was out. What a dreadful absence: not at all like this morning when Mealie just hadn’t come over for coffee and Flossy was imagining her too busy about her painting, too flat-out to interrupt herself. It was that other searing absence, the looming horror of gone, taken, the no-farewell absence that was pressing unbearably in on every side. She moaned and rocked in her chair. Oscar Wilde was scratching at the door. She let him in, her eyes watering up as she fed him.
Grief with no floor, it was flung beyond the continental shelf. What would she do without Mealie? Oh that it not be so. If only she could be taken instead, an old used-up cask of a thing, Mealie had so many more pictures to paint, colours to savour, sunsets to watch. Ready or not, Flossy would have gladly taken her place, walked into the waves that would wash her away to nothing, like Mrs. Woolf choosing the very stones to fill her pockets, weigh her frayed and fragile body down. Had she chosen carefully, had she picked the round ones, the soft shades of lavender rock Flossy preferred, the greens or reds that caught Ruth’s eye? Perhaps she’d chosen irregular shapes with two or three colours burned in crevices, gold and green, purple-yellow with streaks of white, or rocks with no personality at all, do-the-job rocks, hard and hefty rocks.
Across the yards, through Mr. McNutt’s orchard, Flossy could see the lights still on in the studio. “Mealie,” she moaned, “it was supposed to be me.” She put her head down on the kitchen table. She’d been a fool. All these weeks she thought the pull of death was hers, missing entirely that it was Mealie, Mealie who was dying. How could she have been dying? Such an intelligent woman, why didn’t she have her cancer treated? How many years had Mealie come to share her morning hour, her dearest friend, and Flossy had talked senselessly about dead writers, Woolf and Shakespeare, even Bishop. She shoved the books away. She’d had flesh and blood beside her and missed her entirely for all those silly others, those long-dead others. Flossy, nose in a book, the world passing her by and there was Mealie burning her life right down to the wick.
All these years and years Flossy had simply observed from the sidelines as the world’s parade passed her by. She’d done a job and that was it. She’d given her heart to nothing but lost causes and the ungettables of the world when all the while Mealie was right there, her constant, her companion, someone to watch for her, to get her jokes, to care for her, even scratch her back. It was so simple, so silly, but when it came down to it, the soul of a good life.
Now, she, Flossy, was going into the rest of hers as if into a darkened room. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. “What will I do without you, Mealie?” No one would ever know her as well, nor care for her the same. She hadn’t needed anyone else with Mealie near. What would she ever do without her?
Flossy could hear a car. She lifted her head and watched as Richard stepped out of his Volkswagen. What should she say? Flossy sat up, trying to compose herself. She reached for her handkerchief.
By the time Richard closed the screen door and she met his eyes, he knew. Flossy could not speak. Tears were rolling off her cheeks and she could only shake her head. She covered her face with her hands. Richard put his arms around her, muttering his sorrow, and held her long, until they could finally let each other go. Flossy found her handkerchief and blew her nose. Richard put the kettle on and Flossy told him about the cancer.
He poured the hot water into the pot, pulled the tea cozy off the magnet on the side of the fridge, stopped a minute to look at Ruth’s school picture beneath another magnet beside it. “Was that always here?” he asked.
Flossy looked over, “Her photo? Yes,” she said.
“All these years?”
Flossy nodded. Richard sat down at the table and poured milk into his cup.
“I thought there might be something, Flossy,” he said.
She looked up. He’d taken his jacket off.
“She asked me if I’d take care of her affairs, about a year and a half ago. Remember when I was here at Easter? I said I would. She didn’t offer anything more and I didn’t ask.” He poured the tea into their cups. “I’ll go over a bit later and see if I can find any papers.”
“I noticed her leg last week, Richard, and never thought to ask when she was sitting right there where you are now,” she said.
The two of them sat in long trenches of silence. Now and again Flossy would lift an eye up to a desert landscape in her mind that she did not recognize, could not fathom, life without Mealie Marsh. She could hear Richard blow his nose now and again, then leave the room. Sadness and regret sat heavily in the space between them prompting little more than the odd word or two, neither question nor answer. Flossy talked half in a daze, like a patient emerging from an operation that could as easily kill as cure.
They were all they had right now, each other’s slim estranged comfort, a broken pot put together with glue that was giving all over again.
She looked up, remembering Ruth and the day ahead of them. “I’m sorry, Richard, about Ruth, not telling you. I feel I abused your trust. I … I wasn’t a good friend to you.”
“No, no, you were fine, Flossy, trying to be a good friend to everyone,” he said quietly, as if they were talking about yesterday’s weather, before there was any weather of any significance. After a long stretch, maybe three minutes, maybe fifteen, she had no sense of time, he said with some strength in his voice, “Marj said it was you who insisted she tell me now,” he smiled across at her. “I’m grateful for that. I’m trying to dwell less on things missed and more on gratitude for her right now.” Then his tone softened again, “But none of that seems so important just now, does it?”
Oscar Wilde jumped right up into Flossy’s lap, turned around three times and curled up for a nap. “He’s never done that before,” she said, stroking the purring cat. “I think you’d better bring Oscar’s tray back when you come.”
Just then both heads turned towards the door as they heard Ruth and Phil returning from the weir. Jimmy had dropped them off, and between the two of them they were struggling with raincoats, boots and a full pail of fish.
Richard opened the door. As they came up Flossy’s stairs, Ruth saw him and transferred the pail to Phil. She knew who he was. They stood looking at each other for a minute before he took a step towards her, closer but not too close.
Flossy was about to speak, then changed her mind.
“If I had known anything about you, Ruth,” he spoke slowly and as a man holding back considerable emotion, “I promise you, on my life, it wouldn’t have taken me sixteen years to see your first baseball game.” He reached out to tenderly touch her face, she flushed and smiled up at him, taking one short dance step into his arms. Richard Archibald, Flossy thought, looked like a man who was never going to let that child go.
Phil set the pail down.
“How’s the knee?” Richard asked.
“Good. It’s just above the knee, actually,” she peeled herself away from him and hoisted her long shorts to show him the blue and purple circle.
He bent to look more closely. “It’s beautiful,” he said, nodding. “Thanks, I think so too,” she smiled shyly as she covered it again.
“Hello.” Richard held a hand out to Phil.
“This is Richard Archibald,” said Ruth, “my father,” adding quickly, “one of them.” She smiled at Richard as she was turning towards Phil. “It’s complicated.” Then, looking back at Richard she said, “Phil’s my cousin, through Mom, one of them. It’s kinda complicated too.”
Flossy had stopped hearing what was happening elsewhere in the room. The momentary joy she had witnessed and the satisfaction it brought had given way to the oppressive feeling inside her chest. In her mind’s eye she was only seeing Mealie again, stretched out on a hospital gurney. Gone. She looked across at the empty chair and blinked to hold back the emotion that was building in her throat.
“What’s the matter, Flossy?” Ruth stepped closer to her.
Flossy shook her head. “Something awful has happened, Ruth. Mealie was sick this morning and went into town by ambulance. Richard and I followed her into the hospital.” She paused to still the tremble in her voice. She shook her head, “… but she didn’t make it. She died this morning.” Ruth rushed to her and she felt warm arms surround her. The young woman began to cry, great choking sobs that set all the rest of them off again. Richard, standing near Ruth put his arms around them both. Phil sat down in Mealie’s chair swallowing hard.
After what seemed minutes but could have been an hour, the young people went outside to talk by themselves. Richard decided to go over to Mealie’s to shut the lights off.