Few Kinds of Wrong (20 page)

“Electrical. Stalls. A little beyond spark plug replacement,” I say and bend to get back to work.

“Really? Well, I might not know everything about cars but I know that TPS connector looks loose. Might cause a stall on a hill.” Jamie winks at me, smiles, and walks toward the office.

I stare after him, mouth open.

“I fixed one a few days ago with Alan,” Jamie says to me over his shoulder. He goes in the office and places the sandwich and Pepsi on the desk then leaves again.

After putting the Throttle Position Sensor connector back on, I go back inside the office and drink the Pepsi. I have been thirsty but didn't know it until I start to drink. I can't stop thinking about Nan and how dry she must be. I promised I'd be back to the hospital by four so Henrietta could be home when Sarah gets home from Day Camp. It's only a little after two, but I can't stop thinking about Nan, and there are no work orders left. This is summer, a slow time of year when everyone is more focussed on vacations than oil changes and brake jobs. Bryce comes in and I get up.

“I'm going to see Nan.”

“Your mom just left there.”

I just look at him, my eyes searching his face for some reminder that I love him rather than feel the way I do. “I don't need you to fill me in on Mom. I'd rather you not speak to me about her at all.”

“Okay. I thought we were past it.”

“No, we're not. You might be fine with it and she might be fine with it, but it still makes me want to throw up. So we'll all get through this thing with Nan and deal with it, but I don't want to deal with that.” I point to him as if he is the “that” instead of just one half of it, one third of it really as I'm in the mix too.

“You have to accept it. And then we can get back to some kind of normal.”

“I don't know where normal is anymore.”

“Doesn't mean you can't start to make your way there. Like I said, you have to accept it. It's the way it is.”

I tilt my head. “Then how come Aunt Henrietta doesn't know. If it's so acceptable, why haven't you shared it with everyone?”

Jamie comes in and my question hangs there.

“What's going on?”

“Nothing,” I say and leave the office. I walk away and Jamie follows me.

“Where are you going?”

“I'm going to see Nan. I don't think I'll be going home tonight. Henrietta has something with Sarah tomorrow and someone should stay with Nan all night.”

“I'll come by later with some supper.”

I nod. “Okay.”

Jamie smiles and walks back to the Honda Civic he's working on. He crouches by the back door, turning a ratchet with the same passion he plays guitar or sings or makes love. Everything he does is Zen. He flicks his hair out of his eyes and squints at something in the car. I feel such an intense surge of something that is not hatred that I grab the workbench to counter the weakness in my knees.

I shower at the house, change into shorts and a t-shirt that reads
Sarcasm is just one more service I provide
, then go to the hospital.

Aunt Henrietta and Uncle Chuck are both in the hall outside Nan's room.

“The nurses are changing her,” Chuck says. “She soiled the bed.”

I'm not sure what soiled means but it's a good term that doesn't commit to much detail. It's as much as I need to know.“ Oh.”

“It was a bad smell,” Henrietta says. “I asked the nurses about it and they seemed to know. Even before they lifted the sheet and looked. Didn't they?” She looks to Chuck for confirmation.

He nods.

“Smelled some bad,” Henrietta says.

I'm glad I wasn't there. I've watched Nan fade into this remnant of who she was, her body just waiting to die, clinging onto life somehow. To have to add the bad smell to the bad sights I've seen, the awful sounds I've heard, the feel of her rubbery skin. I want to remember her for the good stuff, but I fear that these horrible things will sear themselves into my memory, blotting out the good.

“Remember when Nan rode Jimmy's motorcycle?” I say about the day my second cousin brought over his new Harley, and Nan, at age seventy-one, strapped on a helmet and insisted he take her for a ride. I need to remember a better Nan.

“Got nothing to lose,” Nan had said.

“She could have been killed,” Henrietta says and tsks.

“And miss all this,” I answer back, trying to remember Nan's smiling face on the back of that bike instead of the snarl on Henrietta's face now.

“It was such a nice day,” I say. “All the neighbours were out around and they all stood on the road and watched and smiled and cheered. I can hear Nan's yahoo now.”

I close my eyes, trying to find the picture of her smile. And I do. For a minute I'm back there in the driveway, the warm wind on my face, Dad laughing, Mom saying “Oh my God,” Henrietta squealing for Jimmy to get Nan back in the driveway now.

The nurse opens the door and I hear her say we can go in. She leaves the door open and in the time it takes to open my eyes Nan changes from fun-loving daredevil to paralysed invalid about to die. I close my eyes but she's still there, still dying in that bed.

“I'll be back before Sarah gets out of camp,” I say to Henrietta and walk away.

“Where are you going? You haven't seen her,” Henrietta shouts after me.

“Yes, I have,” I answer.

15

M
OM'S CAR IS
in the driveway when I get to her house. I hesitate before going in. Bryce is at work so I know he won't be here. But will his clothes be in the laundry hamper? Will his fishing magazine be on the coffee table? I knock even though I'm sure the door is unlocked and even if it isn't, I have a key in my pocket.

Mom's face pales when she sees me. “What is it?” she asks. “Is she …”

“No. No.”

Mom steps back and I walk into the porch.

“Why did you knock?” She pulls her hair behind her ear as she speaks.

I don't answer and she says, “Oh.”

“I came to get our photo albums. I want to bring them to the hospital and look at them. All of them. Nan's too. Of Dad and you and Henrietta but mostly pictures of Nan.”

She touches my face and smiles, even though her eyes are sad. “Yes,” she whispers. “Let's go get them.”

Mom walks into her room but I stay outside, just outside the doorway, thinking back, seeing, without going inside, a new book on Dad's bedside table. But it's not Dad's anymore.

“They're in here,” Mom says.

“That's
okay. I'll wait in the living room.”

“No. Come in. They're just in my bottom drawer.”

“No,” I say more firmly. “I'll wait in the living room.” I walk away before she can argue again or realize why I don't want to go in, a look of guilt on her face, a realization of how things have changed.

I'm standing in the living room with my arms crossed when she comes in with a pile of photo albums.

“There's more,” she says, laying that stack down and returning for more. There are big albums with smiley faces and pictures of trees on their fronts, the pictures inside kept safe on sticky pages under sheets of cellophane, and small ones made of black felt with old, ripple-edged black-and-whites stuck into tabs. Lifetimes of pictures, not looked at in how long, I wonder. Has Mom looked at them since Dad died? Do they make her happy or sad? I wonder how they'll make me feel.

Mom brings in the next load, a pile of seven books in her arms. I reach out to help her lay them down.

“Got any boxes or bags? I can carry them in.”

“How about I help you with them? I was thinking of going to the hospital again anyway.”

I open my mouth to tell her no. I want to be alone when I look at these. But then I realize why I want to see these pictures. I want to remember the good times. And the only way to really do that is to look at the pictures with someone else. To say out loud that you remember that pumpkin and how Nan cut her finger on the knife while she carved it and had to go to the hospital for three stitches. To ask what the name of that cat was again, the one Nan said Henrietta hugged away as a little girl.

“We'll still need the boxes,” I say and Mom smiles.

Mom and I have the pictures in the trunk of the car. We wait until Uncle Chuck and Aunt Henrietta leave the hospital before we retrieve them. I make two trips, insisting Mom stay in the room with Nan. Someone has to be with her. Just in case.

It's not that Henrietta wouldn't want to see the pictures. It's just that the memories contained in these albums would be skewed by her perspective on them. Nan's green dress would make Nan look washed out instead of beautiful — the strong Nan who curled her hair and applied lipstick every morning. Dad's old car would be the one that Henrietta got transported to the hospital in the time she got kidney stones, rather than the vehicle Mom used to drive me to my first day of school. The black cloud of Henrietta would obscure the view in all the memories in all the pictures. In my mind, I can hear her now, as I open the first book, full of fairly recent shots when Pop was dead but Nan was still Nan:
Look at Mom
smiling. Poor Mom. She didn't know there that she'd end up here
like this.

Mom and I travel back in time with the photos, our own portable time machine. All of us younger. Many of them taken before I was born. Pop Collins in his uniform before he went to Italy and Africa with the 166th Field Artillery Regiment of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. Mom and Dad's wedding day, Bryce standing next to Dad.

It pops into my mind:
If Dad knew then, I bet he
wouldn't have asked Bryce to be the best man.
The thought makes me gasp.

“What's wrong?” Mom says and looks at Nan, unconscious in the bed.

“I'm a lot like Aunt Henrietta. Aren't I?”

Mom laughs. “Well, you're about half her size.”

“No. I don't mean in looks. In the way I…” I can't find the words. I can find lots for Henrietta: wet blanket, damper, negative Nellie, black cloud, whiner, moper, complainer, glass half empty. The list could go on but I don't want to make them refer to me. Even though the more I think about it, the more it's true.

“You didn't used to be like her,” Mom says and turns the page of the photo album.

“No?” I say it like a question because I just can't remember ever feeling any way but shrouded in this darkness.

Mom shakes her head and starts to sing. “My little ray of sunshine, you're my little ray of sunshine, shine through the day and all through the night, you're my little ray of sunshine.”

I hadn't heard the song in years.

“The last time I heard that was my wedding day. You sang it at the reception and then Jamie sang it.”

The moment, the memory, is like a blow to my body and I suck in air then blow it out, but it still doesn't feel like any breath is getting in my lungs.

Mom singing in front of everyone, the song she sang to me as a child and even through some of my adulthood. Jamie coming up to sing with her then Mom sitting down, Jamie finishing the song. I was his ray of sunshine then too. Not a dry eye anywhere at the wedding. Such a feeling of joy in me and a certainty everything would always be wonderful.

“I have to go.” I'm almost to the door before I finish the sentence.

“What? Why?” Mom stands and the photo album in her lap falls to the floor. Pictures that had been carelessly inserted in the back of the album scatter all over the floor.

“I forgot I have to do something.” I bend to pick up the pictures but stop and turn around instead.

“But I don't have my car.”

“I'll come back for you,” I say. I nearly crash into a nurse as I run down the corridor. Unlike so many times before, when I've run away from something, I know exactly where I'm going and exactly what I'm going to do when I get there.

When Jamie arrives at the house, seven hours have passed since I left the hospital. Six phone calls have come in, although I only heard the phone ring once. After I heard Mom's voice on the machine, asking when I was coming back for her, I unplugged the phone and turned down the answering machine. Five other messages have gone unheard but they are there. I heard the clicking of the tape as it engaged for each message, the whirring as it rewound the outgoing message every time. No voice mail or digital answering machine for me. Only the mechanical whirring of the cassette can ensure that a message gets taken.

One bottle sits empty on the coffee table and the second is three-quarters full in my hand. I've passed out once and woke up again. I've eaten a slice of bread with nothing on it, just to help the burning in my stomach. I've taken four Atasol 30s for the pain, in my side and other places. I've watched soap operas, a game show, and the evening news. The top story was that the price of gas is going up again tomorrow.

Jamie doesn't look happy when he enters the house with his key. The one I gave him. The one I just loaned to him so I wouldn't have to keep letting him in. Jamie stands there.

“Where have you been? Your mom's been trying to call you.”

“I've been right here.” I stand up and fall back into the chair, unable to balance on my feet.

“You left your mother stranded at the hospital.” He places his lunchbox down and takes off his workboots, flashing me back to Dad doing the same thing every day. Something in the way he unlaces his boots reminds me of Dad, the way he flicks the laces away once they've been unwrapped from the top hooks, the way he pulls the laces out a bit, leaving them slack for when he puts them on again.

“Bryce is really pissed off,” Jamie continues.

“With me?” I try to make it sound like that but it comes out a slurred mess, even to me.

“Yes, with you. I can hardly understand you, you're so drunk. Why don't you just go to bed?”