Every Happy Family (7 page)

“Not at all.” She hates to cook. “Food is life affirming.” Faye was a human portrait of denial. At lunch, Les had offered Faye a piece of his untouched mahi mahi because she commented on never having tasted it. He cut off a small section, described it for her, “mild like sole but a meatier texture,” extended the plate, and the look in his eyes, thought Annie, was as if he was offering a piece of himself.

Faye said one word, “No,” and smirked as if he was being ridiculous.

The plane bumps again and Annie bounces in her seat just to tease him out of his fear.

“Oh, don't do that,” he says with a shaky smile. “Keep distracting me. Now what did your spirit guide tell you?”

“She said and I quote: ‘You – meaning me – are carrying around your birth mother's guilt.'” Annie raises her eyebrow and her index finger. “
Birth
mother, she said, though I hadn't told her I was adopted.”

“Hmm.”

“Said my mother transferred her guilt onto me and I was carrying it right here.” She taps the back of her left shoulder. “And her guilt was from murdering my father.”

“Your birth mother?”

“Murdered my father.”

“That's a bit hard to believe.”

“Well, yes, and I had let the whole strange idea slide until I saw a shaman three years later and asked the same question: Why do all my relationships with men end badly? He, I swear, pointed to my left shoulder and said I was carrying around my birth mother's guilt over murdering my father.”

“Astounding.”

“He and that spirit-guide woman both said that if I wanted an answer to my relationship question, I had to ask my birth mother about it.”

“So, I'm sorry, was she in prison for the –”

“I don't think so.”

“Or was this murder figurative?”

“Hmm. Like he died of a broken heart? I guess I don't exactly know.”

“Continue please.”

“So, we're at this restaurant and Faye is yabbering on about her husband, Nickel – What sort of name is Nickel? – and their apartment on Central Park West. On and on about the cost of slipcovers and new drapes. Les and I politely let her talk about herself for an hour straight.” Annie turns to look squarely at Jonathan's warm, brown, tolerant eyes. “She didn't ask one question about our lives, our upbringing, what we did for a living, if we had any children. It was unbelievable.”

“Perhaps it was her way of protecting herself from the pain of having abandoned her children?”

“Well, like Les said, she didn't do it once, she did it twice, so how painful could it have been?”

“But perhaps it wasn't...how to put it delicately, the same father?”

“Well, after enough warm sake shooters I finally cut right in and asked just that – did Les and I have the same father? She looked like I'd just punched her in the stomach. The hoods lifted on her eyes and I could see her making an enormous effort to continue to sit there, and I thought, with sudden hope, that she was going to crack and we were going to meet our real mom.”

“It sounds heartbreaking.”

At that, Annie can't help but give his big hand a stroke. “In a rather cold voice, Faye told us, ‘Yes. You had the same father.' It was very satisfying to have that confirmed.”

“How odd to give you both up then.”

“No kidding. So then, despite Les nudging me under the table, I had to ask the next question: Why did you give us up?”

“She must have expected that.”

“‘If you want to blame someone,' she said, eyes wide open now as anger crept into her voice, and, I thought those were good signs, ‘blame your father. He was the one who was married with his own -'”

Without warning the plane has tipped its nose into a dive. What happens next happens all at once. A forward thunk of luggage overhead, Annie's ears pop and fill with cottony silence. The flight attendant hits the deck and a hundred yellow fez-shaped masks attached to opaque plastic bags drop from overhead compartments with the click-shuffle of jack-in-the-boxes. In the near distance the plane screams obscenely at the ground and the little vodka bottles topple soundless over the edge of Annie's tray.

She flashes on the instructional-video parent placing a mask over her own face first but believes there is all the time in the world to fit Les's bendy rubber mask over his sleeping nose and mouth, slip the elastic behind his head onto the remarkably handy slots behind his ears. He blinks at her, groggy eyed, and she loves him completely. Her own mask smells like the inside of a Canadian Tire store, and when she breathes in, the oxygen bag collapses in on itself. She breathes out and still no movement of air. One more time and it's clear to her that it's not working. Slipping off the yellow cup, she places it on her head, the strap under her chin, and turns to Les. His face is sweetly confused as she hunches her shoulders and grunts like a monkey. She turns her monkey routine on Jonathan, who's pushed back against his seat, hyperventilating into his own deflated bag. And as she laughs at him, herself, at the whole insane situation, the plane levels off and its sharp whinny fades and settles back to its quiet roar. Less than a minute has passed.

A man's southern accent oozes from the walls. “This is Captain Kyle Hue speaking. Very sorry about that quick descent. We lost our cabin pressure and had to get, right quick, to a breathable altitude. But no worries, everything is under control.”

There's a collective sigh like a balloon's slow hiss, followed by bright but subdued chatter. The flight attendant stands, feels her hair and makes a pleased expression as if she's just been pranked.

“That was some weird dream,” Les says, taking off his mask, his speech slurry. “My sister turned into an organ grinder's monkey.”

“Mine wasn't inflating.” She tugs off the yellow cap.

“It's not supposed to inflate,” he says, which sets her off again, a giddy, manic laugh.

She turns to Jonathan who's slumped in his chair, his masked face dipped towards his shoulder. Eyes closed, he looks so perfectly relaxed that for a happy second she thinks he's sleeping. The next second she realizes otherwise and is ripping off the mask and slapping his face. “Jonathan! Les, press the button for help. Help!” She strokes a cheek then pinches a cheek and now pounds his chest over his heart. “Wake up! Jonathan!” She's crying, fighting off Les as he tries to pull her away and a man says, “I'm a doctor, I'm a doctor,” like in some B movie. She grabs for Jonathan and a piece of him comes away, wedged between her fingers by small threads. A shirt button.

“With kids of his own,” she calls out to him, desperate to go back in time, pick up where they left off. “My father, he already had his own kids.”

She is being wrestled backwards towards the rear of the plane. Faye, she wants to tell him, wants him to know, wore perfume, White Shoulders. She left money on the table, to cover her lunch only, and Les made her take it back.

The same doctor who is supposed to be saving her new friend's life is now holding aloft a needle. Les has her in a bear hug to keep her arm steady. “It's all right, Annie,” he whispers. “It's okay.”

She looks at her brother's worried eyes, which are the same rainy grey rimmed in blue as their mother's, winces at the needle's sharp jab. And now she hears something else under Faye's admission, and stops her struggling. “She never told him about us,” she mumbles to Les. “Our father never knew we existed.”

“Maybe,” says Les, as if it doesn't matter to him, but she knows it does by the way his grip loosens as if in surprise.

She murdered his existence she means to say, but her tongue has lost traction in her mouth. Which means he might still be out there.

The plane makes an emergency landing in Chicago and everyone is instructed to remain seated. In her haze, she sees two, or is it three, men stride down the aisle. They're dressed in white, are barefoot perhaps and take what seems like hours to unseat the nice cheese man she freed from gravity and heft him onto a narrow bed so he can sleep more comfortably.

Les strokes her hair, just like her father might have done if given half a chance.

Lovers

“The place is clean and safe,” says Les as he lies in bed, Jill tucked up into his side. Her head is the perfect weight on his chest and her delicious bare leg crosses over his thigh. He's hoping to make love to her but knows she needs to talk first. “Nancy's eating three square meals, being looked after day and night. And, most importantly, she has plenty of companions and they aren't imaginary.”

He's relieved to be back in his own bed in his clean-aired suburb, doesn't believe sleep is even possible in Manhattan without narcotics. It's clear Jill's secretly pleased there's not going to be another parent in the family to worry about. And he's a bit less eager to unite Pema with her birth mother. A damaged mother, it stands to reason, will pass on that damage to her children. But he blames his father, because what sort of selfish moron would be so careless as to knock up his mistress not once but twice. And not even be aware of it. He'd like to meet the man just to shock him out of his dream world.

“I'd feel less guilty if she was in a facility over here,” says Jill.

“That's a second waiting game over which you have no control.”

Jill had spent last summer living with and taking care of her mom, getting her assessed and on the wait-list for a care facility, meeting with estate lawyers and bankers and interviewing caregivers in search of someone to take over when September rolled around. Jill had settled on a kind and respectful Vietnamese woman named Lien who, after a month's time, Nancy decided she didn't know or like and flatly refused to let in the house. Which meant Jill had to take time off work, return to Vancouver and find someone new. The second caregiver was a ballsy Montrealer named Odile who made silver jewelry. She was a terrible cook, an even worse housekeeper, but she played cards and didn't put up with Nancy's moodiness. Then, just after the ordeal with Quinn, which put Jill in bed for three days, a room came up in what the social worker said was the best facility for dementia patients on the whole North Shore.

The holidays had been gruelling. He was working holiday hours, trying to stay on top of things at home while on the phone with his distraught wife every chance he got. The worst part for Jill was having to trick her own mother out of her beloved home into the car and then abandon her at the facility. Les had come up with the pretense that Nancy's doctor had ordered some tests that required sleeping over. After dropping Nancy off – “You'll pick me up tomorrow, right dear?” – the nurses sent Jill home with the order not to come back for five days, at which time she could bring more clothes and some household treasures to personalize Nancy's room. Jill had cried herself sick. This horror show was followed by having to clean out the house in order to put it on the market. The whole family helped out and it was a heartwarming couple of days, Jill putting on her best face in front of the kids. Now, months later, Les is still having to comfort her.

“There's a clique of women in the home,” says Jill, who visited Nancy while Les was in New York, “all Mom's age, all middle class and proud of it, who sit together in the TV room. Each has a purse upright on her lap as if she's out visiting.”

“Sounds all right to me.”

“And anticipating going home. Anticipating someone who loves her coming to take her home.”

“Stop torturing yourself.”

“There's no love in those places,” she says, lifting her head to search his eyes for answers he's not sure he has.

“You don't know that,” he says and strokes her hair, gently forcing her head back down.

“I looked in her purse for cards to play a game of rummy – which she can still do with prompting – rather than sit in that sterile room and let her introduce me to the other patients again and again. Every three minutes. And not one of them remembers having been introduced and I'm greeted in the exact same way each time, same tone, smile. You start to think you're losing
your
mind. Anyway, there was nothing in it.”

“Nothing in what?”

“Her purse. Well, there was a picture of some man in a nest of Kleenex.”

“The man was lying in Kleenex?”

“The picture.”

“Oh. So whose man was he?” says Les, trying to keep up.

“Haven't a clue. When I moved her in, I had to take away all her cash, credit cards, IDs... Odd symbolism to have stripped her of all identification.”

Jill's voice is shaky and Les pulls her closer.

“But I'd left her wallet in there with the kids' school photos, pictures of me and Kenneth, Dad.”

“No picture of me?” he tries for levity.

“And her little book of verse, car keys, reading glasses and a deck of cards.”

“Car keys.” Jill's mother hasn't driven for years.

“She loves that oyster shell key chain. The one she says Dad found that pearl in.”

“So where did it all end up?”

“I asked a nurse, who said ‘patients forget whose things are whose. It's like sharing toys to them.' Then I realized it wasn't even Mom's purse!”

Les snorts. “Who's on first?”

“This tiny lady named Bea had it.”

“You switch them?”

“I told Bea she had the wrong purse and she smiled a great big smile and held on tighter. Got one of the male nurses to do it. The women of that generation listen to men.”

“Was everything in there?”

“Her wallet was, and the cards, but no glasses, book or key chain.”

“Do you think the nurses steal stuff?”

“Les, don't make me paranoid.”

“I wasn't serious,” he's quick to say, admonishing himself for planting that seed. “You know you did the right thing,” he repeats. “It's the best facility in the area.”

“Apparently Nancy has begun to undress herself in the public areas. Unbuttons her blouse, leaves it open, especially when one of the male nurses is around.”

“That's interesting.”

“No, that's weird. Awful. That's so not her.”

“I know it's not her but, Sweetheart, dementia is progressive. Personalities change.”

“They keep it awfully warm in there. I think she's too warm and is too polite to say, can you open a window? Turn down the thermostat?”

“Oh,” he says, having forgotten to mention it and thinking this an opportune time. “I read this article in
Time
. On coffee. That studies are showing something in coffee slows memory loss in Alzheimer's patients.”

“Mom loves coffee,” says Jill, sounding hopeful. “I'll ask them to serve her more coffee.”

On this positive note, he rolls over to face her, hoping his erection isn't too soon.

“What you do think about Beau going away for grades eleven and twelve?” she asks, and he knows the change in subject is a good sign. “That sure surprised me. Leave all his friends. Pema. Grade ten and he's already star of the senior rugby team.”

“If he's serious about pursuing rugby, I guess that school's the place to be,” says Les and kisses around her ear. “He'll have to get accepted first.”

“He'll have to get financial aid, you mean. Are you aware of the cost?”

He starts down the side of her neck and she leans away, making room for him. Under his lips, he feels her faint shiver.

“With room and board it's forty thousand a year. We'd have to remortgage.”

“I want you,” he exhales in her ear.

“He kept asking so I went ahead and set up an interview.”

“Door locked?”

She nods. “The entrance exams could be a problem.”

He cups her face, a gesture she once told him never fails to make her feel beautiful.

“Pema's not happy about it,” she says, then allows her eyes to close as his lips find her mouth and she kisses him back.

With his finger, he outlines her breast – how he loves her breasts – and as she exhales with a soft moan, he can almost see the thundering train of her thoughts derail, feel her sink into the forgotten home of her body. He marvels at her responsiveness, the apparent magic in his hands. She pushes back against him and as her hand disappears under the sheet, his own thoughts crash and burn.

“Ow,” he says in surprise.

“Ow?”

“A pain in the old rucksack.”

“You have to get that checked out.”

“Standing on my feet too long at work.”

“I'll make an appointment.”

“Shh...” He doesn't want to get off track here.

“You sure you're okay?”

“Am I okay?” he asks and takes her hand. “Come on.”

He knows she's tired and was probably hoping to remain horizontal this time but he gently encourages her up off the bed.