Cool Water (32 page)

Lee guides the horse toward the gate and George walks along beside him. When they're out of Karla's hearing George shakes his head and says, “I don't understand these modern women. Out here by herself drinking beer. Should be home raising babies.”

It makes Lee thinks of Lester. He would have said pretty much the same thing.

They reach the gate and George opens it and stretches it out on the ground. Before he gets in his truck he offers his hand for Lee to shake and says, “That's quite the horse, there. Not built for dragging calves, but built for distance, sure as heck. Wait until I tell Anna. I'll show her the picture, eh. Maybe put it in the book.”

After George is gone, Lee slips to the ground so he can walk the last quarter-mile home and limber himself up. He can see the dust of a vehicle coming from the south, so he waits for it to pass, shaking out his legs and taking a few steps on the spot. As the truck approaches, he recognizes it as Dale Patterson's.

It doesn't pass. It slows and pulls onto the approach behind TNT's Trans Am, and Dale gets out. He's got his arm in a sling.

“Torgeson,” Dale says, but he's got no time to talk as he steps over the wire gate on his way to the buffalo stone. “Can't keep the little woman waiting.”

So it's on again, Lee thinks. The mystery man is Dale. Too bad for Karla.

Dale suddenly stops and turns back to Lee and says, “That horse.”

“What about him?” Lee asks, thinking maybe Dale knows where the horse came from.

“If you wanted a horse,” Dale says, “you should have called me. I could have sold you a real one. What the hell good is an Arab horse in this country?”

He doesn't wait for Lee to respond and strides away through the pasture, cradling his bad arm with his good.

In fact, Lee has no response, other than he's not going to complain about an animal that just carried him for a hundred miles. As he leads the horse home, he thinks about Karla in her lacy shirt waiting for Dale, and about her crazy family, the Normans, all the stories, old TNT, and Karla's cousin who stabbed his mother. He wonders what someone like Karla thinks about
him,
the boy who was found in a laundry basket. Maybe nothing. But on the other hand, maybe she looks at him and sums up his life, as he did hers, by what she knows from talk. Not much chance that anyone will forget how he came to have the last name Torgeson.

He stops and loops the reins over the saddle horn and then walks the rest of the way home, letting the tired horse follow on his own.
Everybody knows everything in Juliet,
Lee thinks.

The Stars of Heaven

When Norval is stricken with chest pains, Lila is hell-bent on calling for the ambulance in Swift Current, but the pain subsides and Norval says he will go to the hospital only if Lila drives him. In fact, he says, why don't they just try to get Dr. van Riebeeck on the phone, but Lila says he isn't even certified in Canada yet, and anyway he'll send Norval to Swift Current, so why waste precious time? Since it's the only way Norval will agree to go, she loads him into the car. So as not to worry Rachelle, who's in her room brooding over her breakup with Kyle, Lila calls upstairs and says she and Norval are going for a drive.

“Fine by me,” Rachelle's voice snaps back. “I'm going out anyway. And don't expect me home. I'm staying at Kristen's.”

Not brooding, then.

On the way into town, Norval reports that the pain is gone. He doesn't tell Lila about the tightness, the feeling that an elastic band is wrapped around his chest.

“Probably angina,” Lila says. “They'll do an ECG. And a stress test.”

He doesn't want a battery of tests. He suggests they turn around and go home. He'll make an appointment for a physical, he promises, but Lila won't hear of returning home.

“There's no need for anyone to die of a heart attack these days, Norval,” Lila says. “So we're going to get this checked and make sure. Otherwise, I won't sleep. The surgeries for valve repair and blocked arteries and the like are very sophisticated now.”

Surgery? He certainly doesn't want to be told he's going under the knife. He wonders when Lila became such an expert on the treatment of heart disease and he's tempted to say something sarcastic, but he doesn't because he knows she's concerned. He notices that she is driving fast.

“There's nothing to worry about,” he says. “You'd better slow down or you'll have us stopped by the RCMP, and that won't get us there any faster, will it.” He rolls the window down and feels the breeze on his face. The sky, which had been the blue of early evening when they left Juliet, is now quite dark—dark enough that he can see the stars, millions of them.

“Look at that,” he says to Lila. “Such a clear night sky. No moon. The Milky Way in full force.”

“What are you talking about, Norval?” Lila asks. “It's only eight o'clock. Of course there's no moon. It's still light.”

Eight o'clock. Lila must be wrong. Still, when Norval looks ahead he can clearly see the oncoming semi with its shiny red cab, the gold colour of ripe crops on either side of the highway, the turquoise farmhouse that Lila always says reflects someone's idea of unique when it's really just a very bad decorating choice. So odd—the earth still bright with the colours of the day, and the night sky above, sprinkled with stars.

“The very lights of heaven,” he says. It's a joke, he doesn't believe in heaven, and he's just thinking that he should explain himself to Lila, lest she misunderstand, when the stars disappear and Swift Current lies spread out before them, a small city tucked into a creek valley, and Lila is off the highway and onto the service road, still driving over the speed limit and following the green h signs that indicate a hospital.

And they're almost there, just a short distance from the brand-new facility on the edge of town, when Lila hears Norval say, “Tell Blaine Dolson it's not his fault,” and she looks at Norval and in the evening light she can see that the pain is upon him again, the most agonizing, wrenching pain this time, and she steps on the gas and drives as fast as she can without losing control of the car, up to the Emergency entrance, leaning on the horn and saying, “Norval, stay with me, we're almost there.” There's no one at the door, no one coming, and Lila pounds on the car horn until finally a nurse comes running, and another, and then it's all out of Lila's hands. Things are happening in slow motion—Lila has time to notice that one of the young nurses has pink streaks in her hair—and warp speed at the same time. They get Norval on a gurney and whisk him inside and down a hall, through a door into Emergency, a pair of nurses calling out for a doctor and the tools of their trade, wheeling Norval away, just like they do on the Life Channel, too busy to pay any attention to Lila. Maybe she should follow, she thinks, but it's too frightening. She holds back and then when she thinks,
I should be with him,
it's too late. The door that they've wheeled him through is locked. She looks around and sees no one.
Why is this hospital so deserted?
she wonders.
Where
are the nurses?
Busy. Busy with Norval. So she waits. There are several armchairs in the waiting area and she sits in one of them, and it feels too soft, too obviously chosen for a person needing comfort. She stares at the television on the wall, one program turning into another, a sitcom, a nature show, nothing at all making sense, until a young Hutterite couple in their black clothing come through doors leading from ICU and sit across from her. The woman is crying and Lila can't stand it, she can't sit here and watch a woman cry a few feet away from her. She has to leave,
do something.
Move her car, that's what she can do.

She goes outside and gets in the car, which is still nosed right up to the Emergency entrance and in the way of hospital traffic, forcing anyone who comes along to go around it. There's a blinding bright fluorescent light over the entrance doors even though it's not yet dark, and it shines down on Lila as she sits, paralyzed, until a big truck carrying more Hutterites comes along and she finally starts her car and moves it so they can get by. As she parks properly in the visitors' lot, she thinks,
This is ridiculous, they'll be
looking for me, Norval will want me.
She gets out of the car, locks it and walks back to the Emergency door.

A nurse
is
there looking for her, and she takes her to the doctor, who explains what has happened. “Is there someone you can call?” the nurse, an older woman, asks as Lila sits, unbelieving, with Norval's body—
his body!
—in the treatment room where he'd died, hardly more than a cubicle. And Lila thinks about saying
my daughter
but she shakes her head, no, there's no one to call. The nurse wants information from her, the spelling of Norval's name, his health card number, date of birth, what
funeral home
she would like them to call.
How can she ask that?
Lila thinks. But she has to, of course she does. The nurse is kindly. She tells Lila to take all the time she needs with Norval, and she even brings her a cup of tea, which goes cold on the stand beside the bed while Lila wonders,
How will I tell Rachelle?

Eventually, the nurse suggests that Lila go home and get some rest. She offers to drive her when she gets off in half an hour—“I live out your way,” she says. “Juliet, isn't it?”—but Lila says no. She turns down an over-the-counter sleeping pill too.

She doesn't want to go home. It will be true once she gets home, everything will change as soon as she drives the car into the driveway and has to face the house and the fact of Norval's absence. When she does finally leave the hospital, she goes to the drugstore and buys some makeup and a bottle of bath salts. Her mind is numb as her hands select cosmetics off the store shelves. She almost buys a bridal magazine for Rachelle before she remembers that the wedding is off. After the drugstore, she stops at a gas station and buys a quick-pick lottery ticket and fills the car up, and watches the young attendant wash the dust off the windows.

Now she has to go home. There is no place else to go. There is no more avoiding the truth of what has happened— no avoiding Juliet and her house and Rachelle and the kitchen table with Norval's dinner plate still on it—and she gets back in the car and drives toward the service road and the highway going west. All the way home, she thinks of Norval's last words and what he said before the pain took his ability to talk:
Tell Blaine Dolson it's not his fault.
He hadn't said,
Tell Rachelle I love her.
He hadn't said,
You're every
thing in the world to me, Lila.
He'd had no dying words for his wife and daughter, just a few words for a feckless client with too many kids.

But Norval hadn't known he was dying, Lila reasons. He'd just thought of something, some little detail having to do with Blaine Dolson's accounts, and out it had popped. It had been an abbreviated sentence, the full intent being something like,
They'll probably keep me in the hospital
overnight and you'll have to take a few calls for me. If Blaine
Dolson calls, tell him it's not his fault. There was an incor
rect payment date printed on one of his bank statements. Just
assure him it's our error and not his, and we'll straighten it
out next week.

But Norval had also said something about the lights of heaven. Lila can't remember what, she hadn't paid attention because Norval was always saying things like that, things that were too smart for her, or at least that's how they made her feel, but the reference to heaven—did that not mean he was thinking about dying? And if he was thinking about dying, shouldn't he also have been thinking about her and Rachelle, and not Blaine Dolson? It was selfish of Norval to waste his dying thoughts on a bank client, she thinks, and just as she pulls into Juliet she remembers what else he'd said that evening, about almost getting shot, and how he'd refused to explain himself and sat watching the Weather Channel, as though
he knew.
Oh my God, Lila thinks, he'd been having these chest pains all day and he hadn't said anything, and that's what he meant by “almost shot.” She's furious, absolutely furious with him for not getting medical attention straight away, look what he's done by being careless, just look at how he's left her alone, how could he, and the word
alone
repeats in her head until she gets the car stopped in the driveway, and she pounds on the steering wheel in anger, furious with Norval for being so irresponsible, furious with Rachelle for getting pregnant and causing Norval so much stress, furious with the bank for sending Norval to Juliet in the first place and making him work too hard. And finally sobbing because she's lost him, the other half of herself, lost him for good.

When Lila eventually gets out of the car, the first thing she notices is that the grass is too long. Why hadn't she noticed that before? It was unlike Norval to let the grass grow. He's very fussy about the length of his lawn. She's even seen him measure it, as though it were a green on a golf course. She walks around the side of the house to the back and the grass in the backyard is overgrown as well. Then she notices the new lawn mower, and remembers that the old one was not working, and that Norval had been going on and on about needing a new mower.

She enters the house through the back door and the kitchen, and falters when she sees Norval's plate and the pair of chopsticks on the table. She stands in the kitchen, not sure that she can face the rest of the house, not sure that she can get through this. Perhaps if Rachelle were here they could get through it together. She should try to reach her, try her cell, or Kristen's, ask her to come home without saying why. But Rachelle will argue, demand to know, and Lila will break down, and she can't tell Rachelle over the phone.
Your father died tonight.
Not over the phone.