All Saints (7 page)

“Em? It's me. Cass and Rick are gone. So is—you know. She won't be back. Ever. I promise. And Cass says she and Rick are going to stay away all day. Give you and me time to work this thing out.”

Em sighs. Lifts her face from Garth Marples' pillow. Pushes her coat down so she can breathe. The old-fashioned springs of Garth Marples' bed squeak and jangle beneath her as she turns over on her back.

“Em? Will you open the door? Will you let me come in? Please?”

The ceiling of Garth Marples' room is plaster, done in big swirls with a little nippled flourish in the middle of each one. There would have been an art to that. A learned gesture, practiced over and over. Something to take pride in. She can imagine the master plasterer atop his ladder, demonstrating to the apprentices craning their necks below.

“Em? Will you just let me know if you're okay?”

Okay. Is she okay? She feels one spot on her scalp that's especially tender. Did Liz actually get any hair? There's a mirror on Garth Marples' dresser. She could go and look.

“Em, please open up and let me in. I need to see you. I need—”

She takes off a shoe and throws it
clunk
at the door. Dave stops talking. She turns on her side.
Jangle. Squeak.
Garth Marples' night table is inches from her nose, with the empty water glass and the picture frame. Did he ever wash the glass, she wonders. There's a cloudy high tide mark halfway up. Maybe when he went into the hospital he just left the last of his water to evaporate.

The picture frame is empty too. Strange. For weeks, she's been wondering about a photograph that isn't even there. Just a rectangle of brown cardboard under glass, surrounded by cheap black-painted wood. But there must have once been something in the frame. Nobody puts an empty picture frame beside their bed.

“Okay, Em. You don't want to look at me. I can't blame you. But will you listen? Please? Will you just listen?”

Where could that photograph be? Did he take it with him to the hospital? Was it that precious?

“You remember a couple of weeks ago? When Rick and I went out drinking and came back real late? Well, Rick had invited Liz along. He always liked Liz. He got a kick out of her. He always thought we shouldn't have broken up. Babe, what can I say? I had a few. I went back to her place. I was a stupid asshole. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

Or did he hide it? Was Garth Marples afraid of anybody finding out whose picture he kept beside his bed? Maybe he got rid of it, then. Yes. That would make more sense. Because when you die, people go through your things. Your effects. Paw through them. Show them to each other. Talk. Better get rid of it, then. Get good and liquored up, fumble it out of its frame, rip it into smaller and smaller pieces. Pause to swipe furiously at the wet on your cheeks, the slick on your lip. Then flush the pieces. Press the lever with ceremony. Snap to swaying, drunken attention. Salute. Goodbye. Goodbye who?

“I was never going to see Liz again. I swear, Babe. And I thought she understood that. I thought she knew it was a one-shot deal. Just for old time's sake. But she must have got Rick to tell her where we were living. Wouldn't surprise me if Rick engineered this whole thing.”

Barney. Yes. That's the name. That's who. Goodbye, Barney. See you soon.

 

The smallest place they ever had was the bedroom they occupied for two days and three nights on the train going east. It had a bathroom the size of a phone booth with a sink no bigger than a soup bowl. When Emily filled the sink to wash her hair, the water sloshed back and forth with the rocking of the train, slapping her face and invading her nose.

There was a table the size of a chessboard that folded down under the window. While Dave passed the time traveling through the cars talking to people, Emily sat at the table looking out the window and writing in a lurching scrawl in her journal. Every time the train pulled into a station, she rushed out and bought postcards to send to her parents from Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg.

 

She had insisted they visit Dave's parents once before they left. “You can't just disappear. You have to let them know that you're going.”
And that I exist.

His parents lived in a robin's-egg-blue bungalow in Burnaby. They were little and English and old. Dave's mother began to cry as soon as she saw him, her eyes big and frightened, as if her son was back from the dead. His father, bent and balding above a curiously mask-like face, looked at him and growled, “Been a while.”

The living room, which Dave's mother called the sitting room, was flocked with doilies and peopled with knick-knacks. “It keeps me busy, the dusting,” she whispered from behind a Kleenex when Emily looked around and said something polite.

Emily could see that Dave's father was one of those men who is never at home in his own house, who is forever being reminded to wipe his feet and knock his ash and use his handkerchief and not leave fingermarks. She wondered if he had a shed or something out back where he could go to fart and swear and spit. While Dave's mother sniffled and Emily chattered absurdly about the upcoming trip and their plans, he sat silent, sliding hooded eyes now and then toward his son, then quickly sliding them back. Emily had the sudden strange notion that she was seeing Garth Marples. She knew that whenever she worked on her story after that, she would imagine the Garth Marples character looking exactly like Dave's father.

Dave said almost nothing during the two-hour visit he had agreed to. He sat hunched, in unconscious imitation of his father, checking his watch and sliding his eyes now and then toward Emily, his expression unreadable. (“I don't want to talk about it,” was all he would say on the way home. And so they never did. It was a trade-off. Emily had gotten her introduction. In return, she never asked him to go back there again.)

“I could show you his room,” Dave's mother whispered, tapping Emily's forearm with a damp hand. “Where he used to sleep.” They went and stood together in the doorway of the most feminine room Emily had ever seen—flowered chintz wallpaper, billowing ruffled curtains, a rose-patterned sofa bed choked with those little shaped cushions that men pull out from behind themselves and throw on the floor.

“I did it over. It's the guest room now. I tried to keep it—you know—just the way. For the longest time. In case. But then—”

A bark sounded from the living room, followed by a growl. Then another bark. “Oh no,” Dave's mother whimpered. “Oh no no no.” She darted away, first turning to Emily and hissing, “I
knew
this would happen!”

Emily stayed where she was, looking into the guest room, trying to strip away the ruffles and chintz, trying to picture Dave in it somewhere. “Stop it stop it stop it now!” she heard Dave's mother yelping. “I'll not have it! I'll not have it in this house, and both of you know that!” Then silence.

Back in the living room, she found a tableau. The two men squared off and stiff, their teeth bared. The woman tiny and hunched between them, but defiant. “I'm sorry,” Emily said. And they all turned and looked at her, silently accepting her apology.

 

Through the train window, whenever Emily glimpsed a CN truck on the highway running parallel to the tracks, she imagined it was the one that was carrying their things. All their clothes, books, records, dishes, towels, sheets, address books, tax files, photo albums, toiletries, framed posters, appliances, planters, shoes. Everything they had spent days wrapping in newspaper and wedging into boxes. Everything that would greet them at the end of their journey. Give them a sense of a shared past. Of continuity.

There had been a moment when Dave had looked at the still-empty boxes and the newspaper still in stacks and had suggested seriously that they just get rid of everything. Start over clean in the new place.

The
No!
that had come out of her had been visceral. Wounded. The train tickets were bought. The hotel, where they were going to stay at the company's expense until they found a place, was booked. Their pre-wedding tasks were written down in a list. Her mother, who was finally talking to Dave on the phone and starting to call him Son, was ticking a copy of that list off at her end, item by item. It was all of a piece. It was their life. It was what they had. Couldn't he see that?

“Hey,” he had said to her stricken face. “It was just a suggestion.” Then he had shaken out the first sheet of newspaper. “C'mon. Let's do this.” Gradually, the crackling of the newspaper and the strangely satisfying discipline of wedging as many anonymous shapes as possible into each box had settled her down.

Each night on the train they dressed for dinner and went to the bar car for a cocktail. A porter in a starched shirt and black bow tie poured martinis for both of them out of tiny chilled bottles. Each night, they clinked glasses and toasted a future that was hurtling toward them while they ate, while they slept, while the wheels clacked and the whistle moaned and the landscape out their window changed by the second, whether they were watching it or not.

 

Em gets up off Garth Marples' bed. Walks slowly toward the locked door. Stands looking at it.

She can sense Dave on the other side. Waiting. Listening to her breath, the way she is listening to his. If it wasn't for the door, they would be looking into each other's eyes.

They can look forever into each other's eyes, their faces inches away on the pillow. Not speaking. Not needing to. She can't imagine looking for so long into anyone else's eyes. But in bed, they can study each other's faces for hours. Breathing each other's breath. Smelling each other's smell.

Do other couples do that? Do Cass and Rick? Did Dave do it with Liz? And with the others before Liz? She doesn't know. All she knows is him.

“
Babe?”
Just a whisper. Hardly more than a breath.

She opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. “My name is Emily.”

 

They were married in All Saints church, where her parents had wed. He slid the ring onto the wrong finger of her hand, then had to fumble it off and try again. They bumped noses during the kiss.

“You're us now,” her mother said afterwards, hugging him tearfully.

“Welcome,” her father said, shaking his hand. Then he added, “Son.” Emily could tell her mother had coached him.

The reception was at her parents' house. All her uncles and aunts and cousins were there, and the neighbours who had watched her grow up and the old high-school friends she had almost forgotten but now greeted with a scream. Each and every guest got introduced to Dave, whose smile looked like it was making his face ache and whose voice, when he got a chance to talk, sounded sticky and dry.

His parents had sent a card with a cheque in it. The card sat in a little space that had been cleared for it among the gifts—all the appliances and linens and flatware and stemware and stoneware that had been crammed into the sunroom for display. “My God,” Dave had breathed when he had been taken to see it all. He had sounded dismayed, as if he was looking at some huge, impossible task he was expected to do.

 

They do it on Garth Marples' bed. She is dry, and doesn't come. He is serious for once, almost humble. The only sounds are the jangling squeak of the bed springs. The empty picture frame stands like a mute witness.

Afterwards they lie side by side, staring up at the plastered ceiling. She knows it is up to her to speak, to break the silence, to bring things back down to some safe and ordinary place. She takes a breath. He turns his face to her.

“So much for this room being off limits,” she says.

 

They had just gotten it all together. They had just started to come into their own.

Their place—their final resting place, as they were calling it as a joke—was exactly the way they wanted it. Lemon-yellow walls with dove-grey accents. Narrow grey shelves at intervals, filled with her books, his records. A painted Scandinavian hutch stacked with her grandmother's wedding china. A linen closet stuffed with sheets and towels and comforters and shams. A kitchen gleaming with chrome and copper and the latest gadgets. A state-of-the-art sound system. A big colour TV. Two bedroom closets tight with clothes.

She had just gotten her hair cut almost as short as his, and was helping herself to his tube of gel. He had just shaved clean except for a tiny triangular patch on his chin. She was just starting to reassure him that he wasn't fat, while secretly keeping an eye on the little bulge above his belt. He had just conceded that maybe she did need to wear a bra. Only with certain outfits.

In bed, they had found what worked. They would begin with this, continue with that, then finish with the other thing. If it wasn't as adventurous as it used to be, it was comfortable. It was satisfying. It happened three times a week.

She had just published her first book, a collection of stories dedicated to him. She was just starting to take another look at one of those stories—
Barney
—and to wonder if there was a novel in it. He had just been named regional manager, with six stores under him. He was just starting to decide whether to convert his record collection to tape, or wait for the new compact discs to come down in price.

She had just fallen in love with him all over again. With his face that had softened and started to settle into folds. With his talk, that was rarer and less animated. With his politics, that were more considered, less radical. With the reading glasses he needed now for the paper and the phone book.

She had just started to caution herself, half-jokingly, not to rely on him quite so much. Not to feel quite so relieved by the chime of his keys in the lock at the end of the day. Take quite so much comfort in the sight of his thinning hair poking up above the back of his chair while their dinner was turning slowly in the microwave.