The Present
Simon wanted to please her. Ivy’s pool was built in a hurry and it was almost as big as the one at the golf club. The workers had to chop down a poplar and three weeping birches to do it, but other than that, it was just a matter of digging up the lawn.
Simon hated to see the birches go, the quiet trees he’d had planted himself. He liked the way their leaves didn’t fall in the winter. Once, during an ice storm, way back before Ivy, each leaf had looked as if it were encased in glass. The wind, a warm wind for January, blew through the leaves and they made a delicate clattering sound. Simon thought it was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. He felt it in his gut, even now with the memory. He would never hear that sound again.
On a Saturday, just past mid-June, the pool was ready. Ivy swam and Simon watched. He had never seen her like this. He hadn’t known there could be such a thing as a happy Ivy. She swam and then she wrote in that book of hers. Oh, how I would love to get my hands on that notebook, he thought.
There wasn’t much in Ivy’s notebook because she burned the pages after she was done with them. All the notes she had made relating to Task Number One had been destroyed.
It was Task Number Two she was thinking about now and the joy of it was she would be able to concentrate so much better now that she had her own pool.
Reuben had led her to this task. She waited for him to come now and he did. He was always there. It sometimes just took him a while to make his way to the front. With the voice came a taste, a flavour that was too faint to hold onto long enough to name. Sometimes it seemed more of a texture than a taste. Grit?
At first she had fought Reuben on Task Two because he seemed off base with what he said. Surely all these years later the mother was in the ground or scattered to the winds or in a can somewhere. But he persisted and anyway, Ivy knew it deep inside.
Sure enough, when she contacted Wilf, he confirmed that Olive’s heart was still beating.
“I haven’t seen her, though,” Wilf said. “I haven’t laid eyes on her since the day I dropped her off — what was it? — six years ago.”
“But you know that she’s still alive,” Ivy said.
“Oh yeah, they’d have contacted me if anything had happened.”
Wilf lived out east in Ontario, a place called Brockville. They hadn’t spoken to each other since he tracked her down to tell her that he was placing Olive in a home because she could no longer manage on her own. She was soiling herself and lighting things on fire.
The manager of Olive’s apartment block in Winnipeg had contacted Wilf and told him that it was time for her to go. Wilf arrived at his mother’s suite, smelled her filth in the hallway and read the scrawled letters on the wall beside her door:
MRS. POO-PANTS LIVES HERE!
He found Ivy to tell her, figured she should know. She had told him then, six years ago, that it hadn’t been necessary for him to get in touch, so she wasn’t surprised not to have heard from him since.
Wilf was an important part of Ivy’s past. He’d always been there in the background. It was his money that had supported Olive and her all the years she lived at home, ever since he had been old enough to hold a job. Always at the Bay. He had started in men’s shoes and that’s where he still was as far as Ivy knew. Just at a different Bay in a different city. At least he got away.
“Why do you ask?” Wilf said now. “Are you going to visit her?”
“Maybe.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. She’s my mother.” Ivy was tempted to come clean, to tell Wilf what she intended to do, but she knew it wasn’t safe to do that, not yet.
She had some nasty thoughts. What if I didn’t get the HIV virus from that guy in Vancouver? The test could have been wrong. What if I’m not going to die? What if Wim Winston isn’t going to die after all those hours of bloody sex?
She had bitten Wim’s lip on that last night, hard enough to draw blood. And she had pulled out her own tooth! Ivy couldn’t bear to think that all her hard work had been in vain. None of this would be any good if she wasn’t going to die soon. She put the thought out of her head — she’d had the test. She carried the disease. But she decided to proceed with caution anyway. There was no need to broadcast her plans.
“So where is she?” Ivy asked.
“Just a minute and I’ll get you the address and phone number.”
Ivy turned to a new page in her notebook and copied Wilf’s words. She ripped out the preceding page — the page that said: Phone Wilf.
The nursing home was in the Osborne Village area, which Ivy knew well. On many occasions she had passed by the building where her mother had lived for the past six years. She remembered noticing the residents outside on warm days, drooped in their chairs, breathing in exhaust fumes as the traffic whizzed past on Stradbrook Avenue. It was possible that one of those outdoor sitters had been her mother.
“Thanks, Wilf,” she said. “Take care now.”
“Wait, Ivy! God! Shouldn’t we be asking each other how we are? How are you? How’s Simon? How’s life treating you?”
“Fine, thanks, Wilf. I really do have to go. Something’s burning. Bye now.”
Ivy watched the “Phone Wilf” page disintegrate into ashes in the ashtray, which she seldom used for cigarettes these days. She was losing her desire to smoke, but liked to have ashtrays in all the usual places for her regular burnings. This one was beside a comfy lawn chair next to her new swimming pool.
“Life feels good,” Ivy said and closed her eyes against the sun. I’ll just lie here awhile and then pop in for another swim.