Good to a Fault (34 page)

S
itting at the kitchen table late at night, Lorraine wrote Clary a letter. Her handwriting was not good, and she was self-conscious about it. But she could make a rough copy. It was hard to start.

Dear Clara,

She thought Clara was better, because this should be more formal.

I have to write to thank you for everything you’ve done for us in the last year.

Yesterday I had my first checkup at the cancer centre. They took more blood and did X-rays and I sat in the waiting room for a long time. It made me think about how kind you were all through all that long time. It probably saved my life that you were there looking after the kids and coming in all the time, and I wanted to fix things up between us.

Also because I am not sure how things will go from now on, and I know the kids miss you very much, and I think they need to see you sometimes.

The doctor was pretty straight with me, she told me what to watch out for. It was Dr. Lester, you remember her. They think I’m doing really well with the transplant stuff. I’m allergic to raspberries now, just like Darwin. But they will
keep watching me for a long time. I could get infections, or there are tons of other delayed things, complications. I’m not getting them, but I could, I have to make the plans. My eyes too, I could get cataracts, you have to wait for a couple of years before you know.

It’s all scary but I’m not dead, that’s the bonus. Or it could come back. Maybe I’d rather head to Fort McMurray and have our own lives, but I don’t get to choose that one. I have to stay where I can get help if I need it, and I’ve got Bertrice to go to, who’s been really great.

I’ve got disability coming in now, and I have started back to cleaning a couple days a week and we are managing okay. So this letter is not to ask you for any more help of that kind and I hope to be able to repay you some of the money I know you laid out on us one of these days.

But I know Darlene and Trevor and specially Pearce really miss you and would like to spend some time with you once in a while, if that would be okay with you.

Hoping that you are well,

Yours sincerely,

Lorraine Gage

The stove light flickered gently in the night-silent house as she was writing all this, and she sat for a few minutes listening to the kitchen clock’s delayed, inconstant tick. She read it again. It was a good letter. She tapped the pages together on their edges, and folded it neatly in thirds, and then reached for Clayton’s lighter and set the edge on fire. The smell of burning paper was somehow pleasant in her nose. She carried the burning brand over to the sink. Then the smoke alarm screeled over her head, and she dropped the letter and grabbed a tea-towel to wave the smoke away from the ceiling before everybody woke up.

She would have to try another way.

Clary’s cold settled in her head, making everything grim. She had developed an annoying purple splotch in her field of vision, like an amoeba. At first only a floating mark, it grew until it took over most of her right eye’s sight. She lay in bed one bright morning, afraid to open her eyes. The night before she had
stayed up late, doing her taxes, trying to sort out which expenses she could claim. No charitable donation receipt for practical efforts. By the end of it she hadn’t been able to see straight, even around the blotch.

Right eye open. There it was, still. She would have to go to the doctor. Mrs. Zenko offered to come with her, but Clary laughed it off and said she’d be back by lunch and would stop in and tell her what they had said. Hughes was away; his vacation replacement sent her straight to Emergency. At Emergency they sent her to neurology on the seventh floor. It was a brain tumour, of course, and it would be inoperable.

The nurse said it would be an hour’s wait, so Clary went down to the lobby for a bottle of water.

When the elevator doors opened she could see Paul Tippett coming across the lobby. She pushed 7 again, and the close-door button, stabbing it, but he slid his hand between just as the doors were closing, and when they obediently opened again he saw her.

“Clary!” he said, his face brightening in absurd increments, like a tri-light bulb.

She kept her own face stiff.

“Are you—Who are you visiting?” he asked, that fear in his voice which taints everyone who spends too much time at the hospital. Mrs. Zenko? Moreland’s heart? Even Clary felt a clutching claw.

“It’s only me,” she said. “I mean, I’m here for myself.”

He got into the elevator. “I’ll go with you.”

She did not want to talk to him. “Do you have time?”

“How high are we going?”

She laughed, and it made her mouth feel strange. The doors opened on 7. Paul went with her to the flotilla of chairs in the waiting room. He steered her to one beside an end table, and perched himself there.

“What’s going on?”

She explained about the purple blotch. He listened, but said nothing.

“It’s the strangest thing,” she said, calming down in the face of no reaction. “I can see around it, and I can see through the other eye, but all I can think about is what’s behind the purple. I’m moving my head all the time to try to see what I’m missing.” She turned her head even as she was speaking. It
didn’t hurt at all, just lurked there, purpling. “It’s like a stain on the world—a stain on my view, my way of—” She broke off, embarrassed.

“I broke out in a plague of blisters,” he said.

She couldn’t help it, she laughed. “I know! I looked up shingles on the computer at the library. I always thought they were minor, but they sound terrible, you must be in a lot of pain.”

“It was more Exodus than Revelations. They’re almost gone.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Clary was swept with disappointment, sitting beside him, for the failure of their happiness. Of every happiness, every hope. Ridiculous, she thought. Everything was.

“Why do you keep going to church?” she asked him.

“Paycheque.”

She laughed, but turned her head away. Because he had dodged her question, Paul saw. He shook his head to clear it. No need to be anything but honest with her.

“I have the relationship with God that some people have with alcohol. Something in me is always crying out
God! God!
the way other people’s hearts pant for a drink.”

She looked at his face carefully, to see if he was being flippant. “Sounds destructive.”

He almost asked what she longed for herself, but remembered. Pearce, and Trevor and Dolly.
Flap-mouthed fool.
Talking about God—did he have to flare like an oil well?

The elderly neurologist peered into Clary’s eye with different machines, booked her for an MRI two months ahead, and asked her twenty questions, to no great effect. Paul sat beside her as if he was her husband, praying silently in a constant flow, a storm sewer running under his thoughts.

“Well,” said the doctor, giving up. “It will either get bigger, stay the way it is, or go away. It will probably go away. If it does, please phone and cancel the MRI.” That was all.

Clary thanked Paul. She put out her hand and he held it for a moment: not just shaking hands, she thought—some contact, some reconciliation. That they could be friends, at least. He was kind, and she loved his hands. She closed her mind to the rest of it, to desire or hope, and walked away down
the corridor. Too many times in this hospital, too many times down hallways, always to no purpose. She couldn’t even be sick successfully.

It went away two days later.

To prevent himself from phoning Clary, Paul worked on the homilies for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.
Lent like a prairie fire, burning off the dead material on top, but leaving the metre-long roots,
he wrote in his black scratch.
Burning off extraneous outer / that we are attached to but need to lose
…His belabouring of metaphor never failed to surprise him. He could use Hopkins in every sermon, or Rilke, but of course nobody wanted that. They wanted his own clumsy stories and the way he rode a thing to death, because they could understand that.
What I do is me: for that I came,
fair enough.
I say more: the just man justices…Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places…
But he would not try again the solemn mass where he undressed the altar, the knocks to signify the hammering of the nails into Christ’s hands and feet. There had been too many comments last year. Sheer Merton:
Suddenly there is a point where religion becomes laughable. Then you decide that you are nevertheless religious.

Clary thought she had better talk to Paul. He had left a message on her phone to say he wanted to bring back the carpet. Giving away the damned carpet was the only good deed she had done that was not a blunder, and she was not taking it back. He would be at church all day, because it was Good Friday. She went to church, late, and stood outside the inner door listening, the wood of the door cool under her hand. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter had been her mother’s favourite part of the church year, a hugely dramatic time of mourning and then a concomitant (and to Clary’s mind, equally over-dramatized) awakening joy; Clary had only felt detached. Standing at the back of the church alone, she was ashamed. How could she not have valued, even for that one week each year, her mother’s ecstatic spirit? Her lovely mother, gone from the earth. The only good reason ever to have gone to church was to be with her mother, she thought.

Paul was quiet, as he must be on Good Friday. Last Good Friday she had not known him at all. She looked back at herself then: self-contained, sad, lonely, desperate to be good for something more vital than looking after an old woman.

“We enter this yearly process of being abandoned by God,” Paul was saying, ending the homily, as Clary cracked the heavy door open and slipped inside. “But not without hope,” he said. “Although we become immersed again in the misery of betrayal and death, we know the end of this story, and our awareness of God grows within us.”

It surprised her that he talked so freely in a sermon, never condescending, when she knew him to be shy and stiff in real life. How could she criticize his foibles when her own were so large and identical? He was, however, the one clear-eyed witness to her heavy-handed charity, and her humiliation. And the one whose opinion mattered most to her. Even remembering the rocking raft of his bed, the phosphorescent waves, there was no way back to being with him. In fact she thought she hated him.

Everything around her sank, tides pulled the ocean floor away, unreliable sand. She had stayed in the shadows of the side aisle arches, and she stepped quietly backwards, making sure he did not see her, until she could duck out the side door and go home. Good Friday was no day for talking.

N
oise outside woke Dolly. Not loud: the eaves-drop sound of her parents talking on the front step. She pushed the covers back and got up. The bunk bed creaked and shifted, like it never had at Clary’s house, but Trevor did not stir. Dolly went quietly to the window and leaned against the window screen, the sharp metal squares graphing her forehead.

Their bedroom looked out on the front here, instead of onto the back yard like at Clary’s. She could see the driveway and Darwin’s old car that was theirs now, that he’d left for them when he took Fern to Vancouver, so her dad could give back Clary’s mother’s car. She missed the Dart. She leaned her elbows on the windowsill and listened. The screen door opened and closed, her mother going inside for something. Her dad sat sideways on the top step, one foot lounging down. She could see the smoke he blew out, and smell it, mixed with beer. Quiet for a Saturday night. Maybe it was really late. The street lamp a few doors down buzzed, a different sound than the crickets but slightly the same. No other noise but a motorcycle puttering down the road. The night smell of the pavement was black and wet, like it had rained, but it had not.

The motorcycle slowed, ran softly up the driveway at their house, and
stopped. The man pulled off his helmet. It was Darwin, sitting on that big tattered motorcycle. He had long leather pant legs tied over his jeans.

“Hey,” he said. “How’s it going, Clayton?”

Her dad rustled his back on the side of the wall but didn’t stand up or go down to meet Darwin. Dolly could not call out herself, because tomorrow was Easter eggs, and she was supposed to be asleep, not listening at the window. But she was tired of her dad not liking Darwin. The motorcycle had the word
Triumph
on it.

“Going okay,” her dad said, finally, after a couple puffs on his cigarette.

Darwin walked up, still slow, not barging in. “How’s Lorraine?”

Her dad laughed, meanly. “Took you long enough to ask. Where you been?”

“I go where the wind goes,” Darwin said. He laughed too, but like he meant it. He leaned on the stair-post at the bottom of the steps and unbuckled his side straps.

“What you been doing?”

“Oh, you know, establishing justice on earth.”

“Butting in.” Dolly could see her dad’s hand grind his cigarette out on the step. His hand looked white and small. His skinny wrist stretched far out of his jacket cuff, that old blue mark on his wrist-bone showing.

Darwin lifted his head and looked straight at her window. “Nice night,” he said. She was pretty sure he couldn’t see her, but she waved anyway, to show somebody was glad to see him.

“You’re getting here late enough.”

“A long ride through the mountains,” Darwin said.

“Got your bike back, eh? Have a beer,” her dad said. He shoved the beer case with his foot, scraping it across the concrete with a snow-shovel noise.

“How’s Lorraine?” Darwin asked again.

“She’s fine. She’s working, my boss’s wife got her a couple days cleaning here and there.”

“She ready for that?”

Dolly waited for her dad to say something, but he didn’t speak.

After a pretty long time he did.

“How’s Vancouver?” he asked Darwin, his voice too loud for the night.

Darwin shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

“Been a while since I was out there—you see Garvin and those guys? Juice and Shayla and them?” Her dad laughed some more, like at a dirty joke. Dolly laid her head down on her arm, straightening out her legs one in front of the other as if she was an Egyptian, and gave her forehead a rest from the metal lines of the screen. She thought about that ad of the boy on the bus, and how his face shone the way her dad’s used to.

At the doorway of the kids’ room, checking on them, Lorraine heard Clayton say all that about Vancouver, about Shayla Morton and Garvin, that scary creep. She left her hand lightly on the doorknob, not moving a molecule, and watched Dolly bending down her head. Too much for Dolly to have to hear. She probably remembered Garvin from before.

Darwin said he’d heard they were around.

Clayton popped open another beer. “Yeah. While you were out there, I was thinking. Maybe I’ll drive out there myself in the summer.”

He was going to leave—even Dolly would be able to hear that.

Never mind, Lorraine thought. The middle of her body felt empty. She was not even mad, she just wondered, if she had to quit working, how long the disability would last. She did not think Moreland would kick her and the kids out. The pay-out for the Dart had come in March and she’d kept it, marked
egg whites,
in the freezer. $2,500 would see her and the kids through a couple months.

She could make him stay, if she wanted to. But maybe it would be a relief not to have to look after him. She was stronger now, it would be okay. She backed away from the door so Dolly wouldn’t know that she’d heard, and wouldn’t have to worry. And so she could go out and hug Darwin, and be peaceful because he was there, for however long he would be.

Dolly waited till her mom was gone, and then curled back up in bed.

She dreamed that Darwin came in and kissed her good night, leaning down with his jacket smelling of smoke, but not cigarette smoke. Wood smoke and hides being tanned.
The one who forms the mountains,
the soundtrack in her dream said in a rich, manly voice, like if church was a movie ad.

Late as it was, Paul was still at his computer trying to finish the sermon for Easter morning. Darwin’s foot on the porch brought him down the stairs at a gallop, knowing who it was—he had to pause before he opened the door, not
to seem crazily eager. But restraint flew away as Darwin stepped forward to meet him, like brothers meeting in the wilderness.

“Where are you staying?” Paul said.

“Crashing here a couple days, if you don’t mind?”

Paul pushed the door wider and took Darwin’s duffle bag. “I’ve been pining for company,” he said. “Clary and I fell apart, it was my fault.”

He hadn’t thought that consciously before. Lisanne had not been his fault, but Clary was.

“Things change,” Darwin said. But did that mean they changed from perfect to imperfect, or that they could change again?

Early on Sunday morning Clary answered the phone without checking to see who was calling, which she hadn’t done for months, and it was Grace.

“We’re back,” Grace said.

Clary couldn’t think what to say.

“Welcome back!” Grace said, prompting her. “Hawaii was hot, Vancouver was rainy, we’ve been back for a while now but we were pretty taken up with Fern’s news.”

“I’m glad to hear your voice,” Clary said finally.

“We’re guessing you’re mad at Moreland for letting them have the duplex,” Grace said, her voice not changing at all from normal. “That was all a pretty big shemozzle, her getting better. Might have been better if she had died after all.”

“No!” Clary said, the
no
torn out of her without thought.

“Well, exactly. And they needed a better place than that slum over north there. So I don’t think it was Moreland you were mad at.”

“Grace, don’t lecture me.”

“I wouldn’t attempt to. Pot calling the kettle black anyway because I’m as mad as a fist myself. Fern here is about to have a baby any day, and it appears that she’s planning to keep it and live out here with us, in the absence of an actual husband.”

There was a short silence. Grace leaving time for Clary to put it all in order; Clary thinking about how sleepy Fern had been in January. If it was Darwin’s baby, wouldn’t Darwin stay with Fern? He had left one child already. Was no one any good?

“Don’t worry, it’s that shithead Jack from the U of S again. She met up with him in October when she went out there, no matter what anyone said, and he was back in town at Christmas when she figured out about the baby. And I guess he’s the one who broke Darwin’s nose, too. So she’s spent a few weeks thrashing things out with him and his family, but he’s sticking with the new girlfriend instead, she’s richer. Fern says she’s over him, whatever that means. Apparently Darwin got him to sign papers relinquishing the baby, so at least we won’t have them breathing down our necks—him not suing over the broken nose might have helped with all that. But I’m fifty-six, here, I’m not that interested in a baby.”

“Fern will be fine,” Clary said. “She was wonderful with the children—”

How long since she had said
the children
?

“Well, I know that, but it’s a different thing to have your own. But all we can do is stay calm.”

“When is she due?”

“Oh, not till July, I’m exaggerating.”

“When it gets to be too much for you, come to town, I’ve got a nice quiet house now. I need to talk to Moreland—I’m sorry I haven’t talked to you both, but I was—”

“Fit to be tied—I bet you were. After all you did for them.”

“No, no, it wasn’t that—” But of course it was.

“It’s that Clayton. He’s prickly.”

“They have their own family. I was just a stop-gap.”

“Mm-hm.”

“But I miss them.” She hadn’t said that, even to Paul, even when she was still talking to Paul. “I broke up with Paul, too. ‘Broke up’—that sounds so teenagey.”

“What on earth did you do that for?”

Clary sat down in a kitchen chair. Since this was going to take a while.

“I don’t know, Grace. I was mad. I don’t know.”

“Well, you may not want my advice but I think you’ve lost your mind.”

“No, I don’t think so. His wife had just left, he was still in pain. He couldn’t even talk to me. He only quoted poems to me all the time.” How childish she sounded!

“I wish Moreland would quote a poem or two,” Grace said. “Were you hard on him?”

Clary did not answer.

On Easter morning she tried again to talk to Paul, again thinking church might be the most natural place, while half-conscious that she was somehow sabotaging any hope of real conversation. Maybe it would be comfortingly familiar to go to church on Easter, sing
Alleluia.
Even if it was all hooey.

Watching the women laugh and jostle each other as they stood for the annual Easter Hat photo in the garden after church, she thanked God (or the vacuum of Nature) that she had not worn a hat, and that she had no responsibility in the parish. No need to be friendly, as she would have had to be as Paul’s wife, or whatever they might have become. No bounden duty and service for her. All these women must know that she and Paul had been—whatever they had been. But none of them said anything, not this time. They might be protecting her, the way one or another would come and talk, would shift her attention this way or that, away from Paul, or break the line of sight. She didn’t know why she had come. Now that he had mentioned the carpet she could hardly meet his eyes, for the images recurring.

She could not come back to church, it was impossible.

April Anthony had outdone herself: an Easter cake with coloured eggs in toasted-coconut nests. Trevor would love that cake. Clary was dying for a piece of it herself, suddenly hungry after a long Lent. She could see Paul’s head bobbing above someone’s hat as he nodded, being a careful priestly listener. He was full of flaws, an irritating combination of self-deprecation, self-importance and self-consciousness. He was emotionally spent. And so was she. She loved his nose and his dutifulness.

The question she asked herself, watching fascinated as Paul’s head appeared and disappeared behind the ribbon-swooped, straw-boater-based confection on Mary Tolliver’s head, was this: What was her liability? How much of all this was her fault, and how much did she owe, or could she expect, in compensation?