style="font-size:15px;"> “I know. She’s always carrying on about our uniforms. I suppose they were kind of different in her day.” She smoothes the blanket over Sylvia’s knees, adjusts the curtain to shade the old woman’s eyes from the morning sun.
“Just ring the bell if you need help,” she says to me.
“Hi, Mom,” I say once the nurse has left us alone. Sylvia turns towards me; perhaps it is the unexpected tone of a male voice that catches her attention.
“Doctor, these people never feed me and my hip hurts. Why all the hiking when my hip hurts? I lost my boots on Sunday.”
“Sylvia – Mom, it’s me, Chris.”
“Chris, Chris . . . rhymes with piss.”
“Chris, your son.”
She grunts as though I am lying. “Never had a son. Borrowed one once. And when I lost the library card, well, you should have heard the . . .”
I turn her wheelchair towards the bed, sit on the floral cover, look into her faraway blue eyes and tell her my news. Gabriel – yes, your grandson – blossoming into a tall and handsome young man. So clever. Draws like Frank Lloyd Wright, like Raphael. Sends his love. So does Tracy – you remember Tracy, of course you do, she’s fine, as pretty and sweet as ever. We have squirrels in the roof, can you believe that? Old houses and their maintenance – it’s not the money, you know, Mom, it’s the complications of it all, the effort, it’s the knowledge that you’ll just have to fix it all over again soon. Same for everything, all the stuff in the house, the cars, the business. You work so hard to get it, then you have to work twice as hard to keep it together, to keep it meaning something. As Dad used to say, it’s like trying to put an octopus into a string bag. Keep fixing, doing, forgetting to be. Who wrote “the centre cannot hold”? I don’t remember. Barry played his guitar at the New Year’s party. It was awful, he really shouldn’t have. Sorry, Ma. I shouldn’t whine so much – it’s small stuff, really. A big new contract for the firm, a mixed-use centre in the middle of town, exciting project, progressive client, great budget.
There’s nothing there. She’s staring at the sky through the window again, so I try a different tack.
You wouldn’t believe how much Tracy’s changed. Been going to gym so much she could probably do a full triathlon with a millstone around her neck. Like biltong now, though. And had her boobs done six months ago. Biltong with breasts, well. I never minded her real ones, but she insisted, said she wanted it for her, not for me. Now she’s got tits like a porn star, which is ironic because we hardly have sex any more. Never, actually. Hardly talk, either, unless it’s to bitch. She uses her new tits like an assault weapon, blam – or should that be blam-blam? – in your face. Even a gay guy couldn’t help gaping.
Still nothing.
And to tell you the truth, Gabriel is so different, difficult, I don’t know what to do with him. I’m struggling to keep up with the changes in him. The body and the brain and the emotions of him all growing at different rates, in different directions. It’s not what he does, it’s what he doesn’t do. I’m scared for him – scared that he’ll grow up into a non-person, because non-people get sucked into non-lives. He’s sixteen now – how is he possibly going to live to seventy? He can barely cross the street on his own, can’t hold a conversation unless it’s to beg for something or whine. Yes, he has problems – but we all do, don’t we? I mean, look at you. Look at me. Just look. Just look at the two of us.
Nothing. No thing. No. Thing.
Do you realise it’s nineteen years since Dalia died? Nineteen years since she died pretty much in my arms. And you know what, I don’t miss her. Haven’t missed her for years, didn’t even think about her last night, when. I feel bad about it, feel like I should still be pining, feel guilty that I’m not. Is it okay that the space has been filled by the days in between? Is it okay for her to be dead and for the hole she left to be filled with memories of everything that’s happened since? Is it okay that I’ve filled the hole with good sense, money, family? Or should I have preserved the hole by stuffing it with cotton wool or beeswax? I don’t know.
I look at the backs of my hands, the pores of them. Turn them over, feel the hardened heel of one with the thumb of the other. Breathe in the closeness of the room.
I have this tugging, Mom. This tugging right here, in the middle of me, as though something is trying to pull me down. Or up. Or along. Trying to pull me somewhere else. Or trying to pull something out of me. Maybe it’s my stomach or spleen or something. I’ll get it checked out at my next physical, so don’t nag me about it. It’s a tugging that’s trying to pull me right, but I can’t follow it until I know what I’ve done wrong. Or. Or maybe it’s everything tugging in all different directions from the same anchor point – Tracy one way, Gabriel the next, the firm the other, the squirrels and the teeth and the endless slow decay of things another way yet. Gravity downwards, youth backwards, hope forwards, memory sideways, the future up, the past down, the present whichever way present circumstance dictates. Do you know what it could be, Mom, this pulling of me in all directions? Not, huh? I was hoping, but. I wonder if Dad would have known. He knew everything worth knowing – except maybe how to make money. Do you still miss him, Mom? I do. I miss you both, actually.
And then, the glaze clears and the eyes focus.
“Chris?”
“Yes, it’s me, Mom.” The sudden acid threat of tears at the corners of my eyes. Maybe a few minutes, please, just three minutes, two, one even, where the fog lifts.
But.
“Hmph. I never knew a Chris.” The arms cross and the glaze returns, and with it a fascination with my stump. I try one last time. “I’m Chris,” I say. “Your son.”
“Michael?”
“No, Chris.”
A shake of the head. “I never had a son. Borrowed one once until –”
And then her head snaps up and her eyes widen and fill with tears. Are they old tears, dammed up behind those blue eyes for years, decades, carrying dissolved within them the sorrows of a lifetime, or are they new ones, divined overnight or over breakfast to wash away new fears, fears yet unfaced?
“Get out of the bathroom!” she wails. “You know you may not come into the bathroom when the door is closed. Oh my, I can’t believe you’re sitting right here staring at me while I’m in the bathroom! For shame!” She puts her hands over her face and sobs with the horror of it and then the air in her room thickens with the instant rot of shit, its rough bass notes and bitter-sweet top notes saturating the stuffiness and, I fear, my clothes – I fear me, my hair, my skin, my bones – so I hold my breath, lean over to kiss her powder-soft, blue-marbled temple goodbye.
The sky has been torn open by the strong southeaster – if a smoker tossed a cigarette out of a car window right now, the entire mountain would be aflame. But only the runners are about; the smokers are all still in bed, nursing sore heads, regretting.
There are police cars and tow-trucks at the stranded vehicle now. Men are standing about, their jackets worried by the wind as they scratch their heads and wonder how to right the car.
Is that how they’d left my car all those years ago? Abandoned for the night after being eviscerated, its occupants split up and ferried in different directions, one to the hospital to be revived, the other to the morgue?
Nineteen
