Eleanor Rigby (11 page)

“Okay then, did the farmers get any information from the sky?”

“They did.”

“What was that?”

“They were told the world is a place filled only with sorrow, and that people have no idea where it is we’re destined for. Disaster is inevitable, whether it be by our own doing or as an act of God. That’s why they shouldn’t be afraid—because the end is going to happen no matter what.”

“This made the farmers feel better?”

“Yeah, it did. They were also told that there was a gift awaiting them, and that shortly they’d be given a signal—I don’t know what the signal was to be—and that they’d receive this gift.”

The farmers’ plight chilled me. It seemed to echo my own plight in a way Jeremy didn’t realize, but I didn’t let on about this. “How do you feel about it? You, personally.”

Jeremy relaxed. “I wish I could say the things I see are crap, but I just don’t know. Why would my own life become so messed up like this with MS if there wasn’t some sort of compensation?”

“I don’t always think life hands out compensations, Jeremy.”

“What about life after death?”

“What about death after life after death?” It sounded clever, but I wasn’t completely sure what I meant by it. A bad joke.

“So you don’t believe in infinity?”

“What a funny question. No. Infinity is a mathematical parlour trick. It’s artificial. It didn’t even exist until recently.”

Jeremy smiled. “My brain hurts.”

I tapped him lightly on the knee and said, “Brains can’t hurt. They don’t have nerves. I’m not joining your pity party.”

“Aren’t you a tough nut? I bet you laughed when Bambi’s mother got shot.”

I lost it completely. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed so hard.

“What’s so funny? What’s so funny?”

I picked up my
Bambi
video from the coffee table and told him about my visit from the lovely Donna of Landover Communication Systems, our patron saint of weak coffee and terse notes on the lunchroom fridge asking staff not to touch carrot and celery sticks belonging to other people. Jeremy saw the humour, and said, “Your mother’s going to freak when she finds out about me.”

“Well, yes.” Leslie had forgotten a pack of cigarettes on the table. I lit one, and then, on cue, the phone rang.

It was Mother. She didn’t even say hello, instead merely shouting, “Is it true?”

“Is
what
true, Mother?”

“I’ll be right there.”

“Thank you, Mother.” I hung up and went to the kitchen. “I’m making coffee. Do you want any? Are you allowed to drink it?”

“Yes and no. How much does your mother know about—I don’t know …
me?”

“You’d be amazed how little.”

“Start.”

“It’s just not as easy as that.”

“Why not?”

“Just hang on awhile. If you waited for four years, you can wait a bit longer.”

We shortly heard four (always four) demanding knocks on my door, the downstairs buzzer somehow bypassed. Once I opened the door, I saw her eyes bulging, but I could tell by musculature alone that she’d taken her meds.

“Mother, come in.”

She hesitated.

“No, really. Come in.”

“I didn’t think this would ever happen,” she said.

“I didn’t either, Mother.”

“The adoption people told us he was beyond access.”

“Yes, they did.”

“It’s not my fault. It never was.”

“Nobody’s saying it is.”

Mother remained outside until I really insisted she step in. She suddenly seemed so old, her steps assisted by an invisible aluminum walker as she gently stumped into the living room. There she found Jeremy standing up by the coffee table. She looked at him and said, “So it really is you.”

Jeremy said, “It sure is.”

“Come over to me,” she demanded, and Jeremy did. You’d think the woman was selecting melons at Super Valu. “I wish my husband could have been here to meet you. You look a bit like him. He was killed in a car wreck some years ago. In Hawaii.”

“I know. Please. Sit down.”

“No. I want to look at you a second.” She circled Jeremy, surveying him from all angles. This clearly made him uncomfortable. She said, “There’s your father in there, Lizzie—can you see him?”

“A bit.”

Jeremy said, “Please. Sit down.”

I said, “Do you want some coffee?”

“Do you have any of that Baileys left?”

“All out.”

“Then no thank you.” She looked at Jeremy. “So where did you grow up, then—Vancouver?”

“No. In the sticks. All over the place.”

“Oh—was your family military?”

“I wish. And it was families
plural.
Eleven, all told, and always within
B.C.
”

“Eleven?”

“Yup.”

Mother looked at Jeremy as if he’d been marked with a thirty percent discount, but he ignored this. “Most of my families were religious. Whenever something went wrong, religion always surfaced during my interviews with Social Services, and they always thought a different religious family out in the boonies could fix me.”

“It’s not like you needed fixing,” I said.

“No. I could have told Social Services about being chained to the laundry pole for sixteen hours during bear season. But my foster mom would have raised one eyebrow, looked skyward and said, ‘Kids. The imaginations they have.’”

Mother said, “Oh. Well, I only wanted to know where you were raised.”

“Now you know,” I said.

“When did you two meet? How?”

“I contacted Liz.”

“We were always told it was impossible to find you.”

“It is, unless—”

I interrupted. “Jeremy found a loophole in the system.”

Mother said, “I’ve thrown thousands of dollars at the system for years, and I could never find out anything.”

“You
what?”

“I pray in a closet for him. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since the day we signed the papers.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We never talked about him—
you
—Jeremy. Ever.”

Jeremy said, “I insist—you two need coffee.”

Mother began speaking like she was talking in her sleep. “I’ve also thought about you during the days, too. Usually it’s when I’m preparing dinner, and in my head I’m wondering how many portions to make. I’m at the sink peeling potatoes, or maybe it’s while I’m ironing a shirt. Don’t ask why. I’m standing up and doing something dull with my hands. Leslie and William have kids, but for some reason it’s you I’ve missed. You were the first. I worry about Leslie’s kids, but when I think about them, I’ve never pulled over to the side of a road, out of the blue, feeling like I’ve been kicked in the chest.”

A bit of my wind had left me. “I don’t think I can take any more emotion here.”

Mother ignored me. “Leslie says you’re sick. That you called Liz from the hospital.”

“In a sense.”

“You look fine. What’s wrong with you?”

I said, “Multiple sclerosis.”

“Oh.”

I tell you, those two words are charged, yet nobody knows with what. Perhaps bones darkening and shattering; bruises that come and go without reason, or skin feeling stung by a bee, the skin then wasting away, even while in bed. The dreaded wheelchair, or a plastic bubble, and doubtless dozens of brown plastic medication bottles. I don’t know. Even now that I know what the beast is, it still makes no sense to me.

Seeing us both standing there at a loss for words, Jeremy had mercy on us and launched into a brief description of the disease. Mother bit her lips; afterwards she asked Jeremy how he was feeling right then.

“Okay. I had a nap.”

“He’s going to be staying here tonight.”

Mother said, “Here? Why would anyone want to stay here?”

“Thank you
, Mother.”

Jeremy said, “I’m sleeping on the couch.”

“No you’re not. You’ll come stay at the house with me. I have two perfectly good guest rooms, and one has an ensuite bathroom. And I just made Nanaimo bars, too.”

“Nanaimo bars? You drive a hard bargain, Mrs. Dunn, but no, I want to stay here with Liz.”

The sun had gone down, and the sky was a dazzling deep blue. I said, “Mother, let’s just let Jeremy sleep. Jeremy …?”

Jeremy had started to tremor slightly, as if his whole body was stuttering. We helped him out of his trousers, leaving him in his underwear and a T-shirt. He quickly fell asleep.

He was a beautiful boy, and Mother and I stood there watching him as if he were a painting. I was unsure of whether I could make any artistic claim to having created him. He was the wonderful Christmas present, and I was merely the box, the wrapping paper and the postage stamp. He opened his eyes briefly at one point, but unwarranted attention clearly didn’t seem strange to him, and he fell asleep once more.

I was bagged. For the time being, the old pattern of silence Mother and I shared would remain in place. We had a quick hug and agreed to meet again the next day.

After she left, I walked around switching off the condo’s lights.
This must be what it feels like to be a normal person at the end of a day: small and large dramas; secrets and revelations; coffee cups and plates caked with dried food.
With just the stove light on, I sat on a kitchen chair and gazed at the sleeping form on the couch. Was it really just days ago that I believed this room to be incapable of life?

Jeremy’s body twitched like a perch on a dock.

“Jeremy, are you okay?”

“I don’t know.”

I walked over and sat beside the couch. “Bad dream?”

“Dream? No. Not at all. It was the farmers I saw earlier.”

“Oh. Okay. What happened?”

“If I tell you, you’ll keep it between us, right?”

“Yes—but can I ask you first, real quick, how you know the difference between a dream and a vision?”

“That’s easy. When I see something, I’m really
there.
It’s like in the movies, when a character travels back in time, everybody thinks he’s crazy, and then he pulls a ring or something out of his pocket, and everybody suddenly realizes he was telling the truth and truly
was
back in time. It’s that feeling.”

“Okay. What about the farmers?”

“They were still out on the road, wearing their dungarees and looking at the sky and waiting to be told something more. I could tell they felt cheated, and I could tell they were confused and probably angry. Then they heard a voice from just over a hill. It was a woman’s voice, and as I heard it I thought how voices in visions are only supposed to come to people like Joan of Arc burning at the stake, assisted by angels, but instead this voice was like the woman at the end of the
1
-
800
number you call to order stuff off of TV.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she had news that the farmers wouldn’t like. She said that the farmers were unable to tell the difference between being awake and being asleep.”

“Like we’ve just been talking about?”

“I don’t know about that. But the woman’s voice told them that the farmers had lost their belief in the possibility of changing the world. They asked her what she meant by that, and she said that the farmers just assumed that the lives of their children or grandchildren would be identical to their own lives, that there wouldn’t or couldn’t be any difference.”

“It sounds like they had to choose between certainty and peace.”

“Kind of. I guess what was weird was that the farmers had no trouble with this. They said, ‘Okay.’ And so the voice told them that this was foolish, and because of this there had to be a change of plans.”

“Uh-oh.”

“They were told that death without the possibility of changing the world was the same as a life that never was. The voice said that they’d soon hear words that would make them believe again in a future.”

There was a silence. I said, “That was really crazy and scary what you were doing today, out on the highway.”

“Sorry. But when I get in that state, I can’t stop myself. I really need some sleep.”

“Good night, Jeremy.”

“G’night.”

What was I to make of this strange young man?

*    *    *

In the few remaining weeks of summer following Jeremy’s birth, Mother and I weren’t enemies, but we weren’t friends.

To our mutual satisfaction, in the local shopper paper Mother found a divorcee named Althea down near the ocean who gave painting lessons from her basement. She was an aging, scatterbrained, shawl-wearing fertility goddess. Her students, all of whom were far older than me—and all emotional disasters—showed up at eleven each morning, and we painted still lifes composed of Althea’s bottles from the night before. Around two, once Althea’s gin headache faded, we took our canvas boards to the sunbaked rocks around Lighthouse Park, where we painted arbutus trees, salt- and wind-warped cedars, the calm August ocean and maybe a few rogue clouds. We sat in tribal clusters, and as it was the seventies I had all of these damaged adults around me spilling their guts about multiple orgasms, erectile dysfunction and cocaine abuse. I could barely control my palette knife while a modelling ingenue confided about how much sex and cocaine she’d had the weekend before, and how it “fatigued” her, “but you know, cocaine is non-addictive—” All of those seventies lies. My paintings were dreck, sold at a garage sale ages ago, and doubtless some smart-aleck youngster has found them for sale in Salvation Army thrift stores and has now hung them up as cheesy ironic monstrosities—which is what they were.

My parents and I obviously never told William or Leslie about the baby. It was simply easier not to. My role in the family was to be the maiden aunt, the dutiful one who milks the cows and feeds the chickens; having a child wasn’t in the script we’d all been handed.

The good thing about Mother being erratic is that when her behaviour became even wilder after the birth, William and Leslie just thought it was a bad patch and gave it no more consideration.

Father threw himself into his job at the engineering firm and was gone much of the time. Around me he was quiet, but no more quiet than usual. He gave the occasional sigh, but I think he mended from the experience quickly. Mother, though, had nobody in her life to speak with, and she stewed about the birth far more than I did. Teenagers can be mean and oblivious, and I was no different in that regard. It didn’t occur to me that Mother would be undergoing something major. I now cringe at my callousness, but what’s done is done.