FIVE

The long trumpeted cry of a gull awakened him. The heels of his mother’s good shoes tapped the floor as she hurried down the hallway and then back again, pausing by his door.

“You up? We leave in a half hour.” Her voice strained with forced lightness.

“Right.” The hospital in Corner Brook. Her operation.

“Your father already left for the site. He walked.”

“Walked?” Hell. Aside from hunting and logging, his father hadn’t walked farther than his nose his whole life. “I would’ve drove him down.”

“There was no talking to him.” Her voice faded off and he heard the washroom door open and close. He dredged himself from his bed, the floor cold beneath his feet as he dressed. His tea was poured and stirred and waiting by a plate of toast and eggs. His father’d walked. Well, sir. He sat at the table and looked through the window at the sea, rippling greyish away from him. A southerly wind. Least it was warmish outside. Likely somebody driving along had picked him up by now.

He grasped his mug of tea and blew tepidly onto its scalding rim. His mother hurried from the washroom and across the hallway into her room. She hadn’t mentioned anything about police being there the day before, asking questions. He never brought it up, nor did his father. Neither of them wanting reminders of both their shame that night. A dresser drawer scraped open. Another. She emerged with an armload of folded blankets, bustled into Gran and Sylvie’s room, and within a minute was coming down the hallway again and into his room. He heard the dull thud of his pillow and blankets hitting the floor as she stripped his bed. All her activity took him back to the summers they’d spend in the old Cooney Arm outport where they’d once lived, helping Gran tend the vegetable garden she planted every spring. There was a cliff near their house and he’d watch his mother, those times she became dispirited, climb a steep path to the top. Couple of times he followed her. It was vicious up there, everything swept bald by the winds and the cliff face dropping several hundred feet straight down into the swirling mass of ocean. He could see his mother now, hunched like an old woman, gripping onto tree roots and brambles and dragging herself up that steep path. Scarcely enough energy to stand. Low-minded they called it back then. She’s got down. She’d be gone for hours up on those cliffs some days. But when she got back she’d be upright, shoulders squared, a steadiness to her hands as she took up her cooking and scrubbing in the house and then weeded in the garden till the flies or the rain or the dark drove her in. He felt the same energy consuming her now as she scraped open one of his own drawers and shut it and then her shoes tap tap tapping to the washer in the back room.

He noted her small suitcase by the door. Her good raglan was folded across it and in one of its pockets he saw a glimmer of red. Her little book of prayer. She read it all the time after Chris was buried. It’s what keeps me going when I get scared, she said to him once. Scared. His mother scared. She was scared now. He pushed aside his breakfast plate and went to the door, hauling on his boots.

“Kyle,” she said, coming into the kitchen, “you haven’t eaten a bite. Kyle!”

He held himself erect by the door frame as she came up behind him.

“As well to take your father with me if you’re going to act like that,” she said sharply.

He picked up her suitcase, took it to the truck, and started the engine, warming it for her. He rubbed his bruised ribs, rubbed them hard just to feel the pain of it over the angst in his guts. The morning chill leached through his clothes and he shivered thinking about Clar Gillard splayed out in the icy seawater. His mother climbed inside the cab beside him and was quiet as he drove and he wanted to puncture that growing solitude between them, wanted to ask her about the cliffs of Cooney Arm, but the words stuck like sawdust in his throat.

“You talking with Bonnie?” he asked, thinking he might mention his seeing her sitting at their table the night of the killing and that he knew about her car. Get her mind off this thing waiting ahead. She gave a dismissive shrug. But she was choking with words, he could tell. Just like Sylvie. Choking with words. Wanting to talk about things. Things about Chris and the accident. Things about him, Kyle. Things about themselves. And he never knew what things they wanted to tell him or have him tell them and he bloody didn’t care about them things. Just leave it alone, leave it the bloody hell alone. Christ, he was working on getting things out of his head, not shoving more in.

He flicked on the radio. “See what the weather is,” he said, and half listened to some broadcaster sounding hollowly through the truck as he felt her choked-back silence and that he was abandoning her on a sinking boat. He turned off the radio and leaned over the wheel, looking skyward. “Guess we can see the weather,” he said, scrutinizing the patchworked whites and greys and scattered pieces of blue. “If you can read that. Warm enough?”

She made some agreeable sound and he looked at her and her pallid cheeks. There was a hard light in her eyes. She was wearing her summer scarf around her neck, a thin silky thing patterned with ripe red roses that he swore he could smell.

“Why aren’t you wearing a warm scarf? Thought you liked my stylish scarf.”

“I left it in Bonnie’s car the other day. This will do.”

“She could have brought it back, I suppose.”

“Perhaps she didn’t see it.”

“Not a hard thing to miss, a scarf sitting on the seat.”

“My, Kyle, I got more to think about than a scarf this morning.”

“I don’t like you being mixed up with her.”

“Why, what’s wrong with her? You got more to worry about than her. Sucking back on the bottle like your father. How would you like it if I’d done that? I could have. After Chrissy died. I wanted to.”

Jaysus.

“Don’t you be taking after him, numbing everything with drinking. I’m glad I didn’t give into it. There’s good to be found in everything, even grief. I’ve learned that.” Her voice trembled with feeling yet her words were hard, without gratitude. They echoed through the cab like a confession wrung from her heart and he felt the unworthy priest. He tried to speak, but couldn’t.

She flicked the radio back on with impatience and he hated himself. When they drove into the winter-worn town he was relieved to see her attention taken by patches of lawns starting to green and burlapped shrubs sitting like cloaked gnomes hedging the driveways. She liked cities. The sun flickered and he was glad for the sudden shaft tunnelling through the truck and settling warm around her face. And for brightening the canopied storefronts they were now passing, the white-collared shopkeepers sweeping clots of rotted leaves from their stoops and flooding gutters.

“Father says you always wanted to live in a city.”

“That’s what your father knows, now.”

“Heard you say it myself.”

“Perhaps I would’ve liked it one time.”

“Sylvie wasn’t long taking off after she finished school. Wouldn’t know she was half raised on a fish flake.”

She gave him a sharp look. “Sylvie done what she was supposed to do—finish school and go to university. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Think I got the old man in me. Likes the woods.”

“Never hears you talking nice about your sister.”

He opened his mouth to protest but closed it. They crested a hill, below which the red-bricked hospital sprawled like a crusted sore. Grey smoke belched through smoke stacks and row upon row of frameless windows mirrored the ashen sky, black stains tearing from their corners and dribbling down the brick face. At the entrance to the parking lot he slowed to take the turn and his mother gripped his arm.

“It’s a bit early,” she said, her voice a thin whisper he didn’t know.

He shivered and lurched them onwards down the street and yielded onto a main drag that took them past Pizza Huts and takeouts and smartly dressed mannequins in shop windows. He cut through a ribbon-bannered car lot and passed a school, its yard strewn with hollering kids, and a quiet neighbourhood behind it that flowed up, up, up a steep hill. The houses thinned, the hill plateauing onto a bit of a parking lot deeply cratered from winter’s frost. He parked near the edge of the dropoff and they looked down over the city. Sulphuric smells rose from a smoking pulp mill that headed the harbour while nice shingled homes and shops and oak trees encircled the mill’s land side as ribs might encircle the life-giving heart.

To the northeast and beneath the white dome of sky was the indigo ridge of a mountain range, the range that became the hills of Cooney Arm.

“Almost see home,” said Kyle.

She nodded.

“Almost see the cliffs of Cooney Arm. I followed you up there once,” he heard himself say to her silence. “Wind near ripped my hair out.”

She put her fist to her mouth and he could see that her lips were trembling and he needed a drink, sweet Jesus he needed a drink.

“You looked calm as anything on that cliff top. All squished in amongst the tuckamores. Like they was an armchair. Come to think of it, I followed you up there a couple of times. Always made sure I kept outta your sights. You threatened to beat the crap outta me if I ever went up there.”

“Like your sister. Always sneaking around.”

“Still wouldn’t be landed if that wind got a good snatch. Freaked the crap outta me, that wind.”

“Timid.”

“Timid. Jaysus. Everything was moving up there—clouds skittering, trees rocking. And below, water skittering with whitecaps. Got dizzy. Had to crawl back down.”

Her hands were in her lap, fingers laced.

“Fired you up some, being up there. Had the go of ten people when you come back down. Always wondered why you went. Why? Why did you go up there all them times?”

She shook her head.

“Must be some reason.”

“Made me feel good, sometimes. All that grandness around me. Your father said the same thing about sitting in his boat on the water.”

“I suppose.”

“It’s fine to be nervous.”

“I knows that.”

“Everybody feels nervous about some things.”

“I’m nervous about every fucking thing.”

“Still got to move ahead. We’re blessed like Job then, when we feels the fear of something and does it anyway.”

“Getting your head around something, that’s what’s the hardest.”

“Think of something bigger than you.”

“Right. Bears. That helps.”

“I thinks of my babies I never rocked. That’s what I’m doing now, rocking them. Nothing else matters then.”

His mouth was dry. He’d seen her enough times, sitting by those three little white crosses in Cooney Arm. Three babies that never survived infancy. “Done something to you, losing those babies.”

“That’s it, now, like your father says. Some people have illness, everybody has something. It’s how you carries it—that’s what you take into the other world with you. That’s the only thing we takes. Now, then.” She looked at her watch. “We’d better go.”

Kyle started them back down the mountain road. He parked beneath the overhang of a new addition to the eastern side of the hospital. Taking her suitcase from behind the seat, he walked too fast, slowing for her to catch up each time the clip-clip of her shoes on the concrete started fading. He held the door open and they entered into a spacious foyer where people swirled and shifted around and he stood amongst them like a leaf in an unsure wind. The fan-driven air dried the wet that kept dampening his eyes and his throat felt dry. She touched his hand and guided him towards the elevators and up to the third floor. He followed her down a long corridor littered with medical carts and past workers with impatient eyes and bewildered patients in green jackets pushing their IVs before their slippered feet. The smell of bleach and alcohol brought more water to his eyes. At the nurses’ station his mother was met with a flurry of smiles and charts.

“You’re a bit late, Mrs. Now. We thought you’d stood us up. We have to hurry. Perhaps you can wait in the family room just down the hall,” Kyle was told. “We’ll come for you when she’s ready. Just a few minutes.”

His mother gave him an encouraging smile and he walked down the ward. Gaunt faces stared at him from doorways, nervous eyes. Inside the waiting room he sat at a round table with a puzzle half pieced together and stared along with a few others at some talk-show host on the TV flashing a white smile as she chatted to them.

He got up and paced the ward, his workboots big and clumsy on the polished floors. He went back to the talk show and listened to words he couldn’t hear and tried not to fidget. The host waved goodbye and the news came on, then another talk show, and he wondered if they’d forgotten him.

“Mr. Now?”

He jerked to his feet and went out into the ward. She was lying on a gurney being wheeled towards the elevators by a couple of aides in blue jackets, a nurse at her side. She looked tiny and exposed in a pale green hospital gown, her hair combed back, her eyes biggish and bright as they flitted about like a frightened bird’s. She raised her hand for his when she saw him. He clutched onto it. Awkwardly walked alongside the gurney as they wheeled her in through the elevator doors.

She tugged his hand, half whispering, “I have to put this on” as she looked down at a puffy plastic cap sitting on her chest.

“She’s vain, your mother is,” said the nurse. “Doesn’t want to be seen wearing her granny cap.” Addie smiled and Kyle was glad for the nurse’s stream of banter as they descended to the second floor and down a short corridor. They stopped before a double set of doors, a little window in one of them—the pre-operative room, the nurse called it. “And this is where you best leave us, Mr. Now. We’ll have her back to you in three or four hours.”

His mother’s hand was cold in his. He forced himself to look at her and was relieved. Her eyes were veiled. She had already left him, had left them all. She was tucked inside herself like a babe within a womb and swear to jeezes he could hear her rocker creaking. She gripped his hand and forced her dry lips to smile.

“Go,” she said, surprisingly loud. “Go out for a walk. To a nice restaurant. You best make him leave, else he’ll follow me inside,” she said to the small group gathering around her. They laughed and she gave them a cautioning look. “He’ll be fainting before the doors are closed,” she said. They laughed again and he was proud of her, talking to them all so brave like that, making them laugh.

He squeezed her hand, wanting to tuck it inside his armpit to warm it. He bent over and kissed her brow. She clutched onto his arm, drawing him nearer.

“Be here when I comes out,” she whispered harshly. “And take that cap off my head soon as they wheels me through those doors.”

“I will, I will,” he promised, trying to grin.

“And find a nice place and have your lunch. Will you? A nice place.”

He nodded and she smiled as though he’d just given her something nice and then they were wheeling her through the door and her silky soft palm was still clutching onto his hand and it tore his heart out to pull his hand away. The doors closed and he cupped his hand to the little window, catching one last glimpse of her small face and fading eyes and one last smile as she spotted him at the window. Then she was gone. And his heart shrank as it must have that first moment he was gripped by unseen hands and pulled from the warmth of her belly. Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus, don’t take her, don’t take her, you greedy bastard, you’ve taken enough.

He hastened down the corridor, head down, wiping his face. Through the hospital doors and across the parking lot to the truck. Inside, he started the motor and gunned it down and drove through a maze of streets. Near sideswiping a city bus, he slowed and parked before a fancy storefront and got out. Farther down the street he saw a Holiday Inn. He went inside and found the lounge and sat at a table before a wall-sized window that looked out onto the cars snarling past. The chair he sat on was pinkish and padded and swivelled. She would like it. He ordered a beer and soup but was told it was a buffet lunch. He got up and went into the dining room across the way and took a shiny white plate from a stack on an island and walked around an array of food, passing the plainly cooked dishes of chicken and beef and spuds. Instead he scooped onto his plate the fancy lentil salads, the broccoli and cauliflower soaking in cream sauce, the stir-fries and different foods he knew she’d like. Taking his plate back to his table, he sat, folded his napkin on his knees, and forked the mess into his mouth and tasted nothing of it. City life. What she was cut out for. He’d heard his father moan those words often enough over his fifth or sixth or tenth swallow of whisky in the mornings. City life. Nice clothes. Sin. Sin she was took out of school, working them flakes. And he helped keep her in the outports by marrying her and having babies and he was too damn stubborn to move and her first three babies died because there was no hospital close by.

The third one died in a hospital, Kyle was always quick to remind him, but his father never heard. Too intent on mortifying himself with his hair shirt. And suppose she had never married you, Kyle now thought, wiping his mouth with the white linen napkin, what the hell then? There wouldn’t have been a Sylvie and a Chris and three dead babies. There wouldn’t be a me. And she’d be living down the street somewhere in a fancy house with shrubs and with no cancer. Jaysus. As well to say that Adelaide Now defied her fate to marry a fisherman and was now victim of her own ills. Not to mention all her youngsters were bastards. Perhaps that’s what was in store for him—to discover at the pearly gates that he was little more than fate’s bastard.

He folded the napkin into a perfect square on his knee. He saw in its perfection his mother’s determined shoulders as she pulled herself up that cliff path in Cooney Arm. He saw her bony hands gripping the roots of trees, dragging herself up, inch by inch, her chin defiant against the awful wind snatching at her. Finding shelter for herself amidst the clumps of wind-stripped tuckamores at the top, she’d crawl inside herself for hours, and when she rebirthed herself again she was a force no wind could topple. Adelaide Now was no come-by-chance. She took fate by the throat like an unruly dog and bade it do her bidding. She was her fate. And they stood to learn from her, he and his father. Two arseholes walking like stiffs, scared of farting for fear of crapping their pants.

He paid his bill and went back to the truck and drove around the town till he found a park area and there he stopped. And waited.