February (28 page)

If they had met in a boardroom there would have been a coat tree in the corner. Helen needs to picture this part. There will be a jug of water. Do they really have a jug of water? Has someone gone to the kitchenette down the hall and filled the jug? Is there a mini-fridge with ice cubes and Tupperware containers with names and dates taped to the lids? Do the ice cubes crack and pop in the plastic tray and spill into the mouth of the jug? Forget the jug. And now they must speak. Helen wants to see it. She wants to hear it.

Or it was a series of phone calls. She does not know. How did they decide not to tell the families?

But Helen can get no further. Because how did they get to the idea
Let’s not phone the families
.

How did they come up with that?

And further: How was such an idea spoken aloud, given form, enunciated?

The company was formulating spin. They may not have known about spin back then, Helen thinks, but they were thinking spin. Making it up as they went along (later, much later, someone would say: We should have done some things differently; but that was also spin).

Or, nobody knew how to tell the families. They were not managing the situation. They were in shock. On her better days Helen can believe they didn’t know what they were doing.

And so the families heard on the radio that their loved ones were dead. And they didn’t believe it because surely the company would have called.

Helen had phoned Louise and was incoherent. She had screamed, Cal is dead, Louise. Cal is dead. Cal is dead. And she had slammed down the phone.

Tim Brophy had come over from next door. Helen saw him through the kitchen window, making his way through the drifts.

The snow was lifting off the drifts in transparent glittering sheets that twisted and flapped and folded together at the corners and folded again, and she could hear someone’s tires squealing on the road. The tires were burning and squealing and the engine was growling and it was such a magnificent morning and her knees gave. The trees were encased in ice and the sun shot sparks down the length of the branches. The sun like an old nickel in the sky, tarnished, dull, behind all that flying snow. Helen’s knees would not hold her. The whole world floods you, bursts you open; the world is bigger than expected, and brighter.

It was not that she was closed off to the beauty, because she wasn’t. The beauty flooded her pupils and nose and ears and all of her cells, and there was the belief that what was happening couldn’t be happening, and she hung on to that.

The Brophys had heard and Maureen Brophy had sent Tim over is what was happening. Tim wading through, his cap scrunched up in his fist. He hadn’t done up his jacket. He was rushing, Helen saw.

Maureen couldn’t face her, Helen thought. She must have been standing at the sink washing the dishes, or feeding the baby in the high chair, and she must have said, You go, Tim.

Tim would have started to protest, and Maureen would have spun around, pointing at the back door like you might to a child or a dog, and there would have been no arguing with her.

Maureen would then have straightened herself up because a tragedy requires some people to be normal. Someone has to bake a casserole for the recently widowed. Maureen was thinking of baking Helen a casserole.

This was going on all over the island because the news was on the radio. At the university there were students who had fathers on the rig and brothers on the rig, and some of the teachers brought televisions into the classroom from the audio-video department so they could watch when a story came on the news. People were calling relatives on the mainland; people were arranging airline tickets. The idea of men drowning in that cold darkness was staggering and nightmarish, and the company had said the bloody thing would never sink no matter what.

Maureen had no intention of going over to Helen’s.

Once he’d left his own kitchen Tim was in a hurry to get to Helen, and the blanket of white was aglitter out there. Magnificent and frigid and light-spangled. As long as she lives Helen will never forget how beautiful the snow was, and the sky, and how it flooded her and she couldn’t tell the beauty apart from the panic. She decided then, and still believes, that beauty and panic are one and the same.

She forgot the children; the children were asleep. She had been knocked back to a time before the children. Before anything except when she’d met Cal and, though it sounds silly and made up, though it sounds completely untrue, she’d decided to marry him the very first time she slept with him. This is mine, is what she thought. Let’s keep doing this.

Panic and beauty are inside each other, all the time, copulating in an effort to create more beauty and panic, and everybody gets down on his or her knees in the face of it. It is a demonic, angelic coupling.

Everybody who had listened to the radio in the morning knew by then that the men were dead, and they had tried to imagine the deaths and could not. Tim Brophy was sitting in Helen’s kitchen with his coat still on, his boots dripping over the linoleum.

He answered the phone when it rang, and it was Louise calling back. Louise was phoning back because Helen had hung up on her. Helen didn’t know what she was doing.

Later Helen would say: I didn’t even know I’d called you.

Louise called back and Tim answered, and Louise thought Tim was Cal. It was a weird mistake because Tim sounded nothing like Cal.

Louise said: Cal, I think Helen is losing her mind; she said you were dead.

Louise was forgetting that Cal was out on the rig.

And Tim Brophy said: It’s Tim Brophy from next door. The
Ocean Ranger
went down and it looks like no survivors. The whole bloody thing went under.

The men on the
Seaforth Highlander
saw the men in the water. One is always haunted by something, and that is what haunts Helen. The men on the
Seaforth Highlander
had been close enough to see some of the men in the waves. Close enough to talk. The men were shouting out before they died. Calling out for help. Calling out to God or calling for mercy or confessing their sins. Or just mentioning they were cold. Or they were just screaming. Noises.

The ropes are frozen, the men on board the
Highlander
were telling the men in the water. The men on the
Highlander
were compelled to narrate all their efforts so that the dying men would know unequivocally that they had not been abandoned. And the
Highlander
crew were in danger of being washed over themselves but they stayed out there in the gale on the slippery deck and took the waves in their faces and tried to cling on and did not give in to fear. They stayed out there because you don’t give up while men are in the water, even if it means you might die yourself.

We’re cutting the ropes.

Have you got the ropes cut?

Bastard is all iced over.

Hurry up.

And there must have come a moment, Helen thinks, when all this shouting back and forth was no longer about turning the event around, because everybody on both sides knew there would be no turning it around. The men in the water knew they would die and the men on board knew the men in the water would die. But they kept trying anyway.

And then all the shouting was just for company. Because who wants to watch a man being swallowed by a raging ocean without yelling out to him. They had shouted to the men in the water. They had tried to reach the men with grappling hooks. They saw them and then they did not see them. It was as simple as that.

. . . . .

John in the Dining Room, November 2008

IN THE LATE
morning light John brushes his teeth and stands for a minute looking at his reflection. It was midnight last night before he made it through the revolving door and checked into his hotel in Toronto. He doesn’t like his shirt and he doesn’t have time to change it. But he wriggles out of it fast and a button comes off and pings against the counter. He pulls on a cashmere sweater. His mother gave him a black cashmere sweater for Christmas last year.

John runs his hand over his face and stands still like that, his eyes closed, full of excitement and jet lag. He’s nauseated. Then he pats all his pockets, and his wallet in his back pocket and the swipe key in his wallet, and he’s out the door and waiting for the elevator and down two floors, and three girls get in and the smell of shampoo and the damn thing goes up two floors and the girls get out, and then it goes down to the lobby.

He’s greeted at the entrance of the restaurant and he takes in all the tables. Jane isn’t here yet. He’s glad she isn’t here. He wants to see her walk in. An hour later he has read the paper or tried to read it. Obama gaining in North Virginia. Change. The time has come for change. Yes we can.

John orders poached eggs and they come with grilled asparagus, two pieces crossed like an X on the white plate, and a broiled tomato that he doesn’t touch. The asparagus stinks. He hates that smell. It smells of an overripeness that sickens him. He cuts the egg with the side of his fork and the yellow spills all over the white plate and he puts down his fork. The burst yellow eye of the egg stares up at him. He’s not hungry. A minute ago he was ravenous and now he can’t touch the food.

A woman is standing next to him as big as a house and he nearly tips over the chair standing up and his napkin falls to the carpet.

I fell asleep, Jane says. I’m sorry. I fall asleep all the time. Sitting up in a chair sometimes. Hours and hours. Yesterday I fell asleep in the lotus position. I have no control. Out like a light. The alarm was ringing when I woke up.

You’re so big, John says.

Anyway, I’m late, she says. I’m sorry.

Beautiful, I mean, John says. But he is not at all sure. He knows there is a baby coming but he has not imagined Jane’s body. He has not imagined this beach ball that gives her a waddle, and the softness in her face. He leans over to pick up his napkin and Jane must think he is going to kiss her and moves in and they bang foreheads. Then he tries to make it look that way, like he was going to kiss her, but it’s too late. Two women in business suits at the next table stare at him.

Then Jane looks as if she hears something. She looks distracted and absorbed.

Oh, she says. Oh. She grabs his wrist and puts his hand on her belly.

John feels a ripple, a soft bump.

Did you feel anything, Jane asks. She is lit up. She shifts his hand an inch or so. Do you feel it?

. . . . .

Free Fall, December 2008

HELEN PUTS IN
the other earring. She is going to a concert. There will be Christmas carols and a trapeze artist and men dressed as toy soldiers, and fifty teenage girls in spandex Santa suits cut to show the cheeks of their bums.

She straightens her rhinestone necklace and catches herself in the mirror. She touches the skin under one eye with the tip of her finger. How did this happen? Decades have passed. Centuries.

Sleet rattles the bedroom window; she squirts perfume on her wrist, touches her wrists together.

I’ve got to pick up my grandson, Barry said this afternoon. So, it was his grandson. It was not a wife or girlfriend. It was not a lover. She felt elated. The cellphone rang and he said, I’ll be there, Henry.

My grandson, he said to Helen. He closed the phone with a little flick of his wrist and went suddenly very still. There, in the bird feeder on the window: a blue jay. Where had it come from? How blue. And it flew away.

He let her know, just as if it were any of her business. Not another woman; a grandson.

Tonight a girl of twenty-two, a trapeze artist, will climb two flowing strips of white fabric suspended from the theatre ceiling. Some sort of fabric with sway and give. Hand over hand the girl will climb, until she is suspended in a spotlight. Helen will cover her eyes and squirm in her seat. It is too high. The rhinestone necklace from her fifth wedding anniversary; she looks haggard in the mirror.

Life barrels through; it is gone. Something rushes through. The front door slams and then a door slams in the back; something burns on the stove; birthdays, brides and caskets; babies, bankruptcy, huge strokes of luck, the trees full of ice; gone. She touches her necklace. All gone. She grips the arm of her chair. Switches off the lamp and watches a car come down the hill. The headlights burn through the lace curtain. Pattern on the wall. A pause for the stop sign, then the car turns the corner and the shadow of the curtain moves around the whole room: her dresser, her cardigan on the hook, the mirror, and Helen’s face and arms.

The Christmas show is a fundraiser for the families of soldiers in Afghanistan and her grandson is an angel in the second act. Timmy is an angel.

At the show, Helen spots Patience in the front row, in front of Timmy. Helen bought wings for them at the dollar store. The children sing and twirl and patter off.

Then there is a meaningful hush. The audience anticipates. Two white strips of fabric unfurl from the ceiling. A fog machine switches on and the ballet dancers move on tiptoe across the stage into the wings. The aurora borealis is on the scrim, and stars descend from the rafters, and there is no net, ladies and gentlemen. Please note. There is no net.

The girl in white, in flaring sequins, has climbed the streaming bands of fabric. She is too high. The girl has wrapped herself in the fabric and she does not hold on. She swings her arms in an arc over her head.

The applause comes in bursts and it climbs a ladder and climbs back down and quiets itself.

If I were to ask Barry to stay for dinner, Helen thinks. She has her hand over her eyes; she cannot watch this young girl thirty feet above them. Instead, Helen sees herself putting down a candle on the dinner table. She sees the good silverware.

She cannot ask him.

The girl swings one leg so the fabric circles her thigh, once, twice. She swings the other leg so that leg is wrapped in fabric too.

I could not use candles, Helen thinks. How formal it would seem, and full of expectation. She is abashed. Candles? Candles are romantic and intimate, and she will not use candles, she’ll put the dimmer up as far as it will go. She’ll light the meal like a shopping mall.