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 years. Nineteen years since I lost my leg along with the part of me that lived in it, that fraction of my twenty-one gram soul, the part the surgeons never told me I had lost. A New Year’s party, Dalia driving after her usual night of limes-and-soda, me pissed-but-not, making up nonsense couplets. Dalia laughing, pulling off when the light turned green, and then. Then.
Then.
Then I remember why I hate “Auld Lang Syne” so very much. I find myself hoping that the occupants of the upended car are either properly dead or properly alive, not in some ruined place in between.
I am struggling to go home, my car complicit with my mood, slowing to a crawl before I notice: after Sylvia, I cannot face the indolence of Tracy, Gabriel sleeping through his most vibrant hours. I turn off the highway after the University and take the steep little road up to Rhodes Memorial. Hop through the car park, feel surprised to find the coffee shop open. It’s too windy to sit outside; a yawning waitress ushers me inside. There are Christian posters on the wall. The waitress brings me a menu and a badly designed pamphlet that poses the question, Does God Exist? and provides possible answers next to three tick-boxes: Yes, No, Maybe. When was I last in a church? I don’t know – God in man’s image and all that. I push pamphlet and menu aside and tell the waitress that just a coffee will do. She looks relieved. “Glad you didn’t order tequila, I couldn’t deal with the sight of it right now,” she says and shivers. I’m tempted to change my order, to demand a tequila and to down it while she watches, but I don’t.
I’m the only patron, but the coffee takes an age. When it arrives it is tepid, and I suspect that party-girl forgot about it and left it standing after it was poured. Or perhaps she was in the restroom, temporarily incapacitated by her night on the town. I mean to complain, or to rile her by asking what the Bible teaches about excess, but I can’t be bothered. Instead, I watch the wind tearing at the stone pines while on the other side of the Flats it piles clouds onto the tops of blue mountains, like a great cosmic child trying to see how much ice-cream it can cram into a cone before it all falls out.
I don’t have the experience or the practice that nurses have. It has to be easier when you’re a nurse – your charges are the organs, the lives, of other people. It must be a simple matter – no, a necessary one – to let a carapace grow over your softer bits, to build dense layers of keratin, and to top it all off with Teflon so that the ornaments and the food and the words that are thrown at you cannot pierce.
I am unprepared for any of it, have no such protection. Unprepared most of all for the barb of denial, the sting and the burn of it. My defences are paper-thin, academic – she is ill, she is mad, and none of it is her fault. I know she is in control of neither her mind nor her mouth, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to go back to the home, to shake the old bitch, slap her, shout at her – for hours if need be – until something sinks in and there’s some kind of acknowledgement.
But the truth can be told in different ways. The accepted truth, one I’d held to all my life, is that after Michael and Sylvia adopted me, I became their son; I suppose now she, or her disease, has simply rephrased it. Because she is factually correct, of course. She’d never had a son: there had never been conception, never been a birth, so no panting or pushing or blood or torn birth canal, no placenta, no cabbage-cradled breasts or cracked nipples. Sylvia had never had a son, she’d simply had one handed to her.
But still.
I go home because there is nothing else to do. Pick up the dog shit on the lawn – one leg, one crutch, one poop-scoop. Make lunch because the combination of antibiotics and alcohol is still hurting Tracy, and Gabriel would rather eat Coco Pops straight from the box, starve even, than make himself a sandwich. Afterwards I sketch out some ideas, not very good ones, for the new Murray development that I’ll have to start on in earnest next week.
Google nothing. Read a book whose words don’t hang together despite the writer’s respect for syntax, grammar, story. Feed Schultz because nobody else will. Long for nightfall. Shower when it comes, go to bed. Lie there thinking about the son that Sylvia never had.
And then, at three in the morning, Gabe snoring, Tracy deceptively peaceful in sleep, even the squirrels quiet, the question: the endless, forever question, poking always just beneath the fabric of me, perfectly defined, but like a malevolent spirit never spoken of. The question now