Falling (12 page)

It was no one’s fault that Damian was with a girl right now.

She put the beautiful bottle of gin, with its ornately framed picture of Queen Victoria, back in the liquor cabinet.

For God’s sake, she said, latching the cabinet.

She was not going to do anything so stupid. She was not going to be jealous of her own son’s happiness. No. Instead, she opened the fridge and took out the milk. She’d have
hot milk with marshmallows on top, that’s what she’d do.

But Greg came back into it as she stirred the milk on the stove.

He stood beside her, explaining why the casket should be open during the visitation. Ingrid didn’t want an open casket, but Greg did. They’d been in the kitchen of the house in Halifax, talking about an open versus a closed casket. They could have been discussing the details of Lisa’s wedding, but they weren’t.

Are you doing all right? asked Greg. Talking about this stuff?

She was stirring the milk, but she saw him, plain as day.

I’m all right. No, I’m not.

His face was older, but the same, except for more wrinkles around his eyes. He had a little less hair, especially where it had receded around his temples. It was flecked with white, as if a little snow had fallen on it and he hadn’t shaken it off. The only thing that was different was that he had a new habit of putting his fingers up to his temples when he was trying to concentrate.

How familiar, yet how strange it all was, that he should be back in the house they’d bought as a young couple. They went into the living room and sat on the couch to gather themselves, to make funeral arrangements. The couch, she couldn’t help thinking, had been one over which they’d deliberated. Should it contain a pullout bed, or shouldn’t it? They’d settled on a subdued but practical oyster-coloured cotton duck fabric, with olive-green piping around the cushions. Twenty years later, they sat on it without caring about the coffee stain on the arm, the frayed hem of its oyster-coloured skirt. The couch was floating around in the ocean and they were adrift on it.

She looked down at her hands, dazedly, fingering her thumbs as if she were just learning she had hands.

Oh,
Greg
.

He put his arm around her, the way a brother might have done.

I know, he said.

But then he was up from the couch and out of the living room. He’d gone back to the kitchen to get the forms from the funeral home. She heard him moving around, lifting keys, putting something down on the counter. Silence. Then she heard the sound of a pig being slaughtered. No, not a pig. She ran to her ex-husband, sobbing by the back door.

Stop. Greg,
stop
. She held him as he sobbed crazily.

She was so young, he cried, his face contorted. God. I didn’t see her enough – a couple of times a year wasn’t enough. I thought there was all the time in the world, you know? And now she’s gone, just like that. He snapped his fingers.

You’ll get me started again.

I know. He moved away from her, clumsily, and wiped his face on his arm the way a child would do. Here – what was I doing? I was getting the forms.

He wiped his face again.

Why don’t I make tea? he said. Would you like tea? The kettle’s warm – it won’t take long.

All right. I guess so.

She washed out the teapot and got out the box of tea with a picture of a tiger lying on the side. He made the tea, his hands shaking. It didn’t really matter if she had tea or yak milk. She’d have been happy with a glass of cold water, but he wanted to make tea.

We’ll have an open casket, she said. If that’s what you want.

She put a cluster of small marshmallows on top of the frothy milk in her mug – green, pink, yellow – though she would have preferred a large white one. She sat at the kitchen table, dunking the marshmallows with her index finger, but they were cheerfully unsinkable. Green – who was Damian with? Pink – where on earth could he be? Yellow – had he been in a car crash, perhaps?

Greg was sitting across from her. She knew he was thinking of Damian.

You want to know how he’s been, said Ingrid. How he’s weathering it.

Greg waited.

You know how he used to draw all the time? You couldn’t get him to stop. But now – nothing. He used to be passionate about it. Once he wanted to draw my hands: not both hands at the same time, which would have been easier. No, he wanted the left hand on one sheet of paper, the right hand on the other. Very flattering. The hands of a giantess.

Anyway, she said. The last thing he drew – that I know of – the last thing was Lisa, sitting on a deck chair at the cottage. It must have been the day they arrived there.

She drank her warm milk.

It’s 3:40 and he’s not home yet. Why do I worry, you ask? He’s a man now, after all. I should go back to bed and forget about it.

She got up and took the mug to the sink. She put some water in the saucepan in which she’d heated the milk.

There are things I can’t solve for Damian, she said. And I can’t release him – I can’t release him from guilt.

But by the time she’d turned around, Greg had disappeared.

Ingrid wandered from the kitchen into the living room, as if pacing would help her. She turned on the light. The room was elegant – rigidly elegant – without a breath of air moving in it. Under the pressing burden of heat, the furniture appeared heavier and darker. Ingrid sat down in her father’s desk chair and fingered the frames of the photographs piled up there. Once they’d hung in the upstairs hall.

Here was the one of her mother and father, newly married, posing for the photographer. Her father’s head was inclined toward her mother’s as if she’d been telling him something and he’d been listening intently. An attractive couple, people said. Her father, tall and slim as a beanpole, was, nevertheless, handsome in his suit, and her mother, who was nearly the same height, seemed petite beside him. Her dress had a train that had been artfully arranged on the grass. Her mother’s arm tucked into her father’s. And behind them, part of the facade of an Anglican church was showing, and in the background, far off, the branches of a great elm that must have been cut down since then.

She put the photo to one side, careful not to scratch the walnut of the desk. And here was the hinged photo of Roger and Ingrid together. Roger had been a boy of about seven or eight, yet they’d already made him into a young man: he wore a crisply ironed white shirt, a jacket, and a tie. His hair, youthfully blond, was neatly parted and combed,
and his wide smile reminded her of Damian. He was on the left of the hinged photograph and Ingrid was on the right. She was younger, chubbier, and full of glee. She had a white satin ribbon in her wispy hair. She’d been named for Ingrid Bergman, whom her mother adored, but it didn’t seem to be the right name for such an exuberantly happy creature. Could she really have been this child?

A photo of Roger standing beside his bicycle, looking roguish, and another of him in grey flannels and a blazer with a crest, taken the first year he’d been sent to Ridley College. He’d been well brought up, Ingrid thought, just as she had been. Silver spoons in their mouths. There’d been no need for him to do
stunts
for a living, as her father had said to him, in an aggrieved tone, without raising his voice. He could have gone on to Harvard or Cornell.
If
he’d applied himself.

Roger with Lesley, the lovely Lesley with her arched brows. How their mother had wanted him to marry Lesley! She could hear her mother saying how bright Lesley was, and what a fine tax lawyer she would be. But Roger had waited too long and Lesley had married someone named Richard from Montreal. Anyway, Roger had dropped out of graduate school by that time. He’d been on scholarships, studying physics at the University of Toronto, something Ingrid would never have dreamt of doing.

There was no trace of Marnie among the photographs. Of course not. These were her parents’ photographs. Marnie was bold and strong as a thoroughbred horse, and she would have made Lesley look wan. Ingrid had admired this about Marnie. She was the kind of person who’d worn black for her wedding, while Roger had worn a green jacket and joke bow tie that blinked on and off.

She paused. Another photo in an oval frame: Ingrid and Greg on their wedding day.

Greg had come back to the house with Ingrid after the funeral. She’d been planning on driving him to the hotel, but they talked quietly in the living room, and then, exhausted, they’d fallen asleep on the couch. In the middle of the night she turned sleepily, her body nestled close to his. He shifted, half waking, and put his arm around her. She pulled him closer. He was awake now, and his mouth found hers; they kissed each other hungrily, his hand sliding along her thigh, until she broke away from him. Her foot caught in one of the cushions as she got off the couch and stumbled, yelping as she fell.

Don’t come near me. She was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up.

I’m not –

You shouldn’t be here now. You don’t have a right to be here. She got up, leaning against the armrest of the couch so she could rub her foot.

Ingrid. Listen –

Was there someone else? You said there wasn’t another woman, but
was
there?

No. I told you.

There was Erika.

That came later. I was with Erika; you were with Joel. Let’s not talk about this.

You left us. You left your kids. She sat down heavily in the armchair, apart from him. And here you are again, back for the funeral of one of those kids. Ironic, don’t you think?

We’re tired, he said. We’ve been through hell.

One hell leads to another, she said.

Don’t do this.

How could I have loved you? she said. I don’t think I ever loved you.

Ingrid, it’s not the time –

It might not be the time, but it does me good.

Does
it?

No. No, of course not.

She went to the window and parted the curtains so he wouldn’t see her crying. There was only blackness, rain slipping down the glass.

Nothing does any good, she cried. Why go on?

You have to. We have to. There’s Damian.

Yes, there’s Damian.

He needs you.

Sometimes I can’t think about Damian. I just want to swallow a whole bottle of pills and go to sleep once and for all.

No, you don’t.

He went to her, but she didn’t want him.

It’s despair, he said. That’s what it is.

What do you know about despair? She twisted herself into the curtains so the sheer white material covered her head, her shoulders, her back.

I know about it, he said. She was my daughter too.

Ingrid was still wrapped in the curtains, so her head was swathed in white. She unwound herself.

I wish it had been me.

It’s what I wish too – that it had been me – but you can’t think that way.

I
do
think that way.

Just don’t talk about doing yourself in, he told her. It’s bad enough losing Lisa.

I don’t want to live.

Yes, you do. You were always tough-minded. Of the two of us, you were the strongest.

Why are you being kind to me?

You know why.

No, why?

Because it’s what we need. You need it, I need it, Damian needs it, or we’ll never get through.

She stood still, looking at him.

I wasn’t telling you the truth before, she said. About us, about – I did love you, you know.

I know. We loved each other, Ingrid.

She stacked the photos carefully in several piles and rose from the desk, going back to the kitchen where she scrubbed out the saucepan in which she’d heated the milk. Her scrubbing was fierce, more than the saucepan needed. She wasn’t safe in the living room; she wasn’t safe in the kitchen. She wasn’t safe from herself anywhere in the house.

In the game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, prisoners didn’t have to stay silent, betray each other, or suffer punishment. They could co-operate. But what if, thought Ingrid, her thoughts apparently swimming from one side of her head to the other, what if Prisoner A was also Prisoner B?

What if the game was played against the self?

It was impossible to sleep; it was too hot. She went back into the living room and lay down on the chesterfield. She
must have dozed for a while, because when she woke it was dawn.

She wondered, confusedly, whether Damian had come home. Maybe she hadn’t heard him. She went down the hall and opened the screened door, where she saw Damian cutting across the front lawn, large as life. But when she stepped outside to look around the corner of the porch, there was no car parked in the driveway. He continued walking across the soft grass of the lawn, with an easy, confident way of carrying himself. It was as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

Ingrid had spent the night worrying. Damian had been with some girl.

She watched as he crossed the street and stood by the stone wall next to the gorge. A man on a bicycle zipped by, and a plump woman jogged slowly along the sidewalk, but he didn’t notice them. Finally he sauntered back to the house, stooping to pick something when he got to the porch steps. He sniffed it. When he came into the kitchen, Ingrid saw that what he’d picked wasn’t grass; it was a bunch of clover, with rounded purple blossoms that nodded in his hand. He looked like someone who’d opened a door at the beginning of the world.

DAMIAN HAD FOUND HIMSELF
in Jasmine’s bedroom. She’d invited him in, first to the kitchen, where they’d talked, and then to the bedroom, where she lit a candle and loosened the tie-dyed curtains, drawing them across the window. There was a mattress on the floor, neatly covered with a thin quilt, and, beside it, a girlish lamp with a china ballerina holding her arms up to the lacy shade. Jasmine had invited him into her room, but the mattress on the floor hadn’t invited him. The tie-dyed curtains and the china ballerina hadn’t invited him.

She stood near the window, shyly, her hair falling around her face.

Scared? he asked.

She unbuttoned her pale green dress.

I’ve never done this. She didn’t lift her head as she spoke. I mean, I have done this, but not as fast as –