All Saints (15 page)

But even now, she wonders if they should do something. Make a gesture. Sometimes during Dave's visits she imagines him cranking the hospital bed flat, then either unfastening her arm and leg braces or managing to manoeuvre around them, and starts to laugh. The oddest things strike her funny now. Her wheelchair. The first time the team got her into it and took her for a ride, she giggled all the way, imagining a Chinese empress in a litter. Cleopatra on her barge. And her walker makes her into a six-legged creature.
Ladybug, Ladybug,
she thinks, as she lurches down the hall. She has to keep control of herself around Della. Della is deeply suspicious of all humour.

The only one of her visitors that the horse seems to like is Simon. When Dave cried that first time, it jerked its head up and cantered away toward the stream. Now it just ignores him, the way it does Della. But whenever Simon comes to help with her speech therapy, the horse takes a few steps toward him and stands, swishing its tail. Swivelling the downy tubes of its ears toward his voice.

 

“Okay, Emily, how about this?” Simon is pointing to a drawing of coins and dollar bills on her picture board. She doesn't like the picture board. It embarrasses her. But she likes Simon.

Money,
she thinks. Then, very precisely, she says it aloud.

“Pillage? Hmm. Interesting. I think the word might be money, though.”

That's what I said.
She tries again.
Money.

“Okay. Pillage it is. Now what about this?” He points to another drawing.

It's a church.
She thinks the word. Hard. Then says it.

“Fools' refuge? Did you say fools' refuge?”

No, I said church.

“Because that's brilliant, Emily. I love it. Fools' refuge.”

Simon found her one morning when she was in the rehab lounge, looking out the window. The horse raised its head and focused on something over her shoulder. She turned her wheelchair to look. Grey-streaked red hair. Clerical collar. She recognized him, but couldn't remember his name.

“Emily? It's Emily, right? Didn't you teach a couple of writing workshops in the basement of my church? All Saints? A few years ago?”

“Boatswain!”

“Uh, Simon, actually.”

That's what I said.
Simon.

“Okay. Boatswain it is. Kind of like the sound of that. Hey, listen—I've got some folks I have to visit in here, and a funeral to do this afternoon. But I'll be back tomorrow, and we'll have a chat.”

He's been dropping in once a week ever since. He asks her questions—a welcome change from being told how fabulous she looks—then listens to her strange replies and tries to make sense of them.

“Felicitous intake. This is kind of like charades. Intake. Do you mean the food, by any chance? Okay. Score one for me. And felicitous. Are you telling me the food here isn't bad? Bingo.”

 

“Focus on the can of pop, Emily.”

The team have started putting sticky electrodes all over her left arm and running a low current through them. It feels like pinpricks and makes her muscles jump. The horse laced its ears back the first time they turned the machine on.

“Envision reaching for the can. Then grasping it. Then lifting it up.”

It might help if I drank pop
, she thinks. Which comes out as, “Disrupt consistency.”

“What was that, Emily?”

Maybe if it was a martini?
she tries again. “Overthrow anomaly?”
I'm just trying to be funny.
“Grovelling for satyrs.”

“Just keep seeing yourself reaching for the can, Emily. Look at your arm. Imagine it moving.” The rehab team is relentlessly optimistic. They herald each bit of progress like the parents of a newborn and set goals for her. Transfer from bed to walker. Walker to toilet. Toilet to walker. Walker to bed.

“Good, Emily! You made it!”

Just don't put it up on the damned bulletin board.

Sometimes, feeling a bit subversive, she lets herself think the word
never
. The team doesn't like that word. (“We're not going to say that you'll never get some return in that left arm, Emily … ”) She hasn't written
never
yet. She can see the word clearly enough in her mind, but that's no guarantee it will travel down the tube of her right arm to the hand that holds the pen. Still, her written vocabulary is pulling far ahead of her speech. The team has given her a black notebook to collect her words in. It is spiral-bound, and lies flat. She has already filled a third of it. Her handwriting looks the same as it always did.

Della keeps bringing her notebooks, too—trendy-coloured ones with stiff bindings. Emily can't think of a way to get her to stop spending her money. Even if she could form the necessary words in her mind, get them out of her mouth or down the tube and out onto the page, she knows something would get scrambled on its way to Della's comprehension.

“Oh honey, no! It's my pleasure! And you're going to fill those notebooks up, sweetie! I just know you are!”

Emily wishes Della would stop calling her pet names, but can't think of how to tell her that either. Besides. Della is her godsend. Remember?

It was Della who called the ambulance. She had arrived for her private mentoring session—the eighth such series that she had paid for, despite Emily's increasingly broad hints that writing was perhaps not the best activity for her to be pursuing. When Emily didn't answer the lobby buzzer, Della roused the super and got him to unlock the apartment door.

So far, she has brought six notebooks for Emily, none of which can be held open with one hand. They are lined up on the shelf under the bulletin board. Della dusts that shelf with Kleenex, and keeps shuffling the notebooks into different arrangements of colours. At the moment, their order is lemon yellow, peach, robin's egg blue, lime green, burgundy and violet. Emily has made a point, with each new acquisition, of deciding on the exact shade—pulling the word into memory, getting it down the tube and adding it to her list.

 

This month the baby animal is a white colt, just two hours old, according to the caption. It braces itself on its tall stick legs and twists its head up and under its mother's belly to nurse.

Is that how you looked when you were a baby?

The horse does not respond.

It doesn't like questions. Whenever she starts to wonder where it came from or why it appeared right after she had the stroke, it goes as far away from her as it can. She still worries that it might disappear—abandon her altogether. That would be worse than the cards and flowers drying up, the visits ceasing. But she can no longer keep questions from forming in her mind. She tries to do her wondering idly, fleetingly, so as not to alarm the horse. Even so, whenever she starts, it raises its head and seems to be listening.

She takes a mental inventory of horses she has known. She remembers those safe, tethered pony rides in parks. The last time—she must have been seven or so—the pony defecated hugely the minute she was lifted onto its back, causing her so much embarrassment that she couldn't enjoy her five times round the paddock for twenty-five cents. Was that pony white? Maybe. She can see herself picking out a white pony to ride. She only ever rode a full-grown horse once, when she was a teenager, and was so alarmed by the distance between her stirrup-clad foot and the ground that she couldn't wait to get down. She can't remember what colour that one was, either.

There were the white Lipizzaner Stallions she saw one year at the Royal Winter Fair—a kind of horse ballet. The audience was invited to visit the animals inside the stable after the performance. Emily stroked a few long hard noses. She did it tentatively, ready to snatch her hand back at the first show of teeth. She couldn't get over the size of the stallions. Even though they were locked up in their stalls, she was nervous of their weight, their power.

Pegasus? Could her horse be from mythology? Pegasus was white. And unicorns are usually depicted as white. Alexander the Great's horse—Bucephalus—was it white? What about Napoleon? That famous painting of him mounted on a rearing horse. She can't remember if it's white or not. She could Google things like that. She could ask Della to unplug her laptop and bring it to the hospital.

She wishes she could talk to Simon about the horse. Sometimes, when he is visiting her, she has the odd feeling that he can sense its presence. The horse remains interested in him, coming close to sniff with softly flaring nostrils at the picture board.

Simon has started telling her odd little things about his life, his church. The way the roof is leaking at All Saints, and the basement floor buckling from tree roots—he calls it Revenge of the Druids. And how funerals have been outnumbering baptisms for years. When he apologizes for dumping his problems on her, she puts out her right hand and says, “No.
No.
” She is hungry for news of other peoples' lives, any details at all. She learns that if she adopts a certain demeanour—very still and receptive—he will forget himself and open up.

“I've got two potential sources of revenue at All Saints, Emily. There's what the old guard actually put in the plates every Sunday on condition that the place stays the way it was when they were kids. And then there's what a developer would give for the land All Saints is sitting on. So unless a bunch of critical thinkers get their asses into the pews real soon, my choices are death by creeping irrelevance or death by wrecking ball.”

I'd come, if I could.

“Advent obstacle? Now there's a good one. Advent. Do you mean … ”

 

“You've made incredible progress, Emily. The left leg has gotten back some strength—enough to support you. But the walker will likely have to stay in the picture. We're really excited by what you're doing speech-wise. You're grabbing hold of more words every day and making them your own. So keep up that notebook. Now, about the left arm. There hasn't really been any return, has there? We'll continue the therapy as long as you're here, but it looks like you're going to need help with basic things once you leave—shopping, cooking, laundry, cleaning. Take a look at these brochures. Assisted Living is probably the best … ”

“Listen, old girl. I'd take you in. You know that. If I was on my own. But … ” Dave's not on his own. He's on his third wife. Valerie. Or is it Janet?

“Damn it, Emily, I should be running an old-time abbey—a place where people could come if they needed shelter. But the fact is, I'm running a museum. And I'm starting to wonder if I should just let it die, one way or another. Maybe trying to keep it alive is vanity on my part. Or fear. Maybe All Saints is just asking me to leave it alone. Let it be. Take it off life support.”

“Of course I've been delivering your rent cheques, Emily.” Della's eyes sharpen on the word
rent
, followed by a question mark, that Emily is pointing to on a page of her notebook. “But the super told me your lease is going to be up soon. So I think it's time we talked.” Della stops. Sits. “Emily,” she begins again. “I've been thinking.” She takes a breath. “I want you to come and live with me.” She starts to cry. “It's what I want. I do. And I could handle it. I could take care of you. I could.”

Della cries on and on, while Emily pats her hand. She had a feeling this was coming. Della is one of those people who wait all their lives for a disaster. Wait to be one of those people who pull someone out from under earthquake rubble and nurse them back to health. Or just nurse them.

“I could do it, Emily. I know I could. And I'd be good at it. I would. It's something I'd be very, very good at.” Emily hands Della the box of Kleenex she brought with her that morning.

 

At night she lies awake. She knows she should be weighing her options, two of which are sensible and two silly. She should be putting the silly ones out of her mind and deciding between Assisted Living and Della's offer.

Instead, she entertains herself—if that's the word—with fantasies of living with Dave again. Rolling her walker up to her end of the table three times a day. Making cheery, unintelligible small talk in the face of Valerie's (or Janet's) baffled fury.

Or she pictures herself as a sort of modern anchorite, holed up in a corner of Simon's church. Living on casseroles baked by aging church ladies who die off one by one until there is no one left, and nothing for her to eat. But until then, people come to her with their questions and worries and she sends them away pondering her strange, oracular responses.

Assisted Living. That's what she should be thinking about. But she hasn't even looked at the brochures the team brought her. She keeps picking them up, one by one, then setting them back down. They're too glossy. The mature models on the covers smile with an impossible gladness, delighted by just everything.

Della, then. Could that work? It's a two-bedroom apartment. Della's mother lived there until her death five years ago. The bathroom is big enough, apparently. She could help Della with the rent. Listen to each succeeding chapter of her memoir. Negotiate carefully, for all the years ahead, to keep Della from crossing that line between devotion and resentment.

Options.

Even in the dark she can see the faint shine of the horse's white hide. Hear it snuffle softly and shift its feet.

You're here for me. Aren't you?

Yes. It is. And it would follow her into Assisted Living. Follow her into Della's cat-smelling apartment. Be there for her. For the rest of her life. If she let it.

If I let it.