Interference (15 page)

10

It isn't where Claire's husband, Ralph, usually puts it. His hat. And his keys are gone too. The front hall table looks odd without his pile of things. Claire has maybe cleaned up again? But that's the way it is these days. One minute he has a grasp on things, the next minute nothing makes sense. Of course Ralph won't say anything about this to anyone. It is okay to worry about going crazy, losing things, missing things, but to admit it aloud is something that would make him horribly uncomfortable. Ralph needs his family to believe that he has some sort of control. Especially now with Claire's cancer. Someone needs to take control. Even if it is fake.

“Why are you standing there staring at the table?” Claire moves into Ralph's line of vision. On her head is a furry hat. It looks like something a baby would wear. Pink, fuzzy. It must be one of the three she got from that weird driver, the older woman who drove her to radiation that time in the fall. Jude wears his hat too, but Caroline won't go near hers. She kept complaining about lice and other things that might be mixed in with the wool. Jude and Claire just stared at her, calmly, wearing their hats. “I like my hat,” Jude said, smiling, his orange-sparkly hat balanced on his head. Ralph remembers Claire laughing wildly, full-throated, her head thrown back, the veins in her neck prominent against the white pallor of her skin, her bones showing. So much weight she's lost. So much skin almost. Ralph can't figure it out. Now her skin is paper stretched tight over bone.

Ralph can't bear to look at Claire some days. The ache he feels is akin to indigestion or acid reflux — a deep splintering pain in his chest radiating up to his jaw, the feeling of no control. She is still beautiful without her hair but because of her thinness and baldness and sharpened features he feels he can see her skeleton. He sees right through her skin to what she will look like when she is dead. And this frightens him to the point of distraction. In fact, maybe that's his problem. Maybe he is losing things, forgetting things, because he's so worried about Claire? That's a very real possibility. Stress can make you forget things.

“I'm going out,” Ralph says. “Do you need anything?”

Claire shakes her head. Her pink hat moves down a bit and covers the place her eyebrows would be, the place they are slowly growing in. “You're standing there staring at the table as if it's going to bite you, Ralph.” She laughs. “Sleepwalking?”

“Just trying to remember what I need at the store,” he says. He pats her on her fuzzy-hatted head and walks out the door. “Nice hat.”

She smiles. “Gift from that weird woman who drove me to radiation. The Brussels sprouts woman.”

“I thought so.”

And then, as he turns away from her, “Milk,” Claire says. “And bananas.”

“Right.”

“No Brussels sprouts. Ha ha.”

Ralph smiles at Claire.

The steps are icy and Ralph holds tight to the railing. Jude was supposed to shovel last weekend, but he forgot and then the weather warmed slightly and the snow on the steps turned into solid ice. No matter how much sand Ralph sprinkles on it, it doesn't seem to matter. Teenagers, Ralph thinks. Absent-minded. Even worse than he is. You could look Jude right in the eye, make him agree that he heard you, and the next minute ask him again what you said — he wouldn't know. Their minds are occupied with sex, Ralph reasons. At least his boy. His daughter, Caroline is probably thinking about boys. Not sex with boys. Just the boys. But take a boy and a girl and what do you get? Sex. So, in fact, she's thinking about sex. Just indirectly.

But how is he to know? How is Ralph to know what his teenage kids think about? He can't even remember, from one minute to the next, what he's thinking about. He can't even remember what it was like to be a teenager. And why is it that when you are a teenager you can forget things without thinking you have Alzheimer's? As soon as you hit fifty if you say, “I can't remember,” everyone looks at you with sympathy.

Down the slippery steps and onto the sidewalk. Ralph stands there, scratching his uncovered head. He reaches into his pocket for his keys, remembers he can't find his keys, but finds his hat there instead. He puts his hat on his head and begins to walk towards town. Better for him anyway, not taking the car. Safer, perhaps, with the way his concentration is lately. Maybe his keys are in the car? He'll check on that later.

His head down against the slight wind, Ralph walks forward to his destination. Not once does he look back to where he knows Claire will be watching from the front window. Always there. When Ralph comes home from work she is standing there in the dark staring out. What else has she got these days but the ability to stand in a window and look out into the world? Ralph finds it unbearable. Although he understands it. Claire just wants to feel part of something, he guesses, even if it's really part of nothing. Part of watching the world go by. Sometimes Ralph wishes they lived on a busier street, that way Claire would have more to look at. As it is, the occasional dog walker/snow shoveller/mail delivery doesn't seem enough to occupy her. But still, every day she's there. Watching.

At the corner Ralph turns right. He wonders if maybe he's had a stroke. Maybe that's the problem. Like now, for instance, he turned right, away from downtown, when he's supposed to be running errands. It's as if his feet have a destination he knows nothing about. But then he isn't quite sure what he was getting downtown anyway. Claire mentioned two things. Cereal? Wouldn't he know if he had a stroke? Wouldn't he have fallen down or fainted or something? Ralph knows that on TV they play that commercial where they list the signs of stroke but, for the life of him, he can't remember what they are. Dizziness? Heartache? Indigestion? Confusion? Memory loss? Blackouts? Sadness?

Up ahead there are kids on the street. Standing there in the snow and cold. Talking. For a minute Ralph thinks they should be in school, but then he remembers it is Saturday. If it were a school day, Ralph reasons, he'd be at work. The kids are looking at him strangely, but Ralph merely nods as he walks past, his feet crunching in the snow.

His feet. Crunching. Cold feet. Ralph looks down. That's what they are looking at. Ralph is wearing his house slippers. In the snow. He can feel the heat move up across his face and then down his back. He shivers. What an ape. His red velvet house slippers. The silly ones Claire got him for Christmas two years ago. A matching red velvet bathrobe to go with them. He's never worn it but he liked the slippers. “You'll look like Hugh Hefner,” she had said and he had laughed and Jude had said, “Who's Hugh Hefner?” Ralph forgot to put on his boots. Ralph looks at his slippers but doesn't stop his pace. No need to let these kids know he didn't wear his slippers on purpose. Maybe that's what all men his age do. How would these kids know differently? Maybe their own fathers walk around on Saturday in their slippers in the snow. Maybe they forget things all the time. Maybe Ralph is no different.

“Freak.” Shouted.

When he turns the kids scatter. He has that, at least. Ralph is big. Kids are afraid. Even if he's an aging man, lost, shuffling in slippers through the snow.

He continues on. What else can he do?

Nothing is wrong. Nothing. He's just absent-minded, distracted, worried about Claire's cancer. That's all it is. Anyone else would be like this. But now he has to somehow get back into his house without his kids or Claire noticing his footwear. And without his keys. This could be difficult.

At the next corner Ralph doesn't know where to go. Right or left. He is up by the elementary school and he can't, for the life of him, remember how to get home. Or to town. Where he needs bananas and milk. That's it. Bananas and milk. Ralph turns left. His hands in his pockets are cold. Why didn't he think to wear gloves?

This has been happening for months. This forgetfulness. A little wire in his brain, maybe, snapped. Maybe it snapped when the doctor told them Claire had breast cancer. Maybe it fizzed quickly, went taut and then snapped. Maybe that's a stroke?

Ralph is sitting on the climbing structure at the school, watching the snow blow across the field. The wind has picked up. His feet are cold and caked with snow and ice. He taps them carefully, hoping he doesn't get frostbite.

The funny thing is that he's having no difficulties at work. You'd think he would. Remembering numbers and codes, dealing with clients and proposals, the small complicated things he does every day as an engineer. He has never once set off the door alarm at the firm, for example, something almost everyone does at least once in a while. No one has said anything to him about his work habits, nothing seems to have changed, and Ralph feels in control there. But at home it sometimes takes all Ralph's energy to remember his kids' names. Jude snapping his fingers in front of Ralph's face, saying, “Dad? Dad? Are you in there?” Caroline rushing out to her friends, shouting, “I told you yesterday. I'm going to the movies.” And the other night when Claire came to bed and Ralph rolled over to touch her and felt that empty, vacant place on her chest, that raised scar, he jerked violently away because he had forgotten — he had forgotten! — she was missing a breast.

There is a kid there, beside him. Sitting right beside Ralph on the climbing structure. His leg is actually touching Ralph's leg. Ralph looks at him. The kid looks back. Where did he come from?

“Hi,” Ralph says and moves away slightly.

The kid nods. A strange, gangly looking kid, probably Jude's age, his hands stuffed into his winter jacket, his toque on low over his eyebrows, his nose running in the cold. Why is he sitting so close?

Ralph gets up to leave and then sits down again because he has no destination, no forward movement. Sometimes, Ralph thinks, it's as if there is lead in his legs, his arms. Sometimes he will become so incredibly tired. He will sit still until the feeling passes. Maybe he should get his blood sugar tested. Maybe that's what this is all about. But the thought of going to a doctor just about knocks him off the climbing structure. Ralph is tired of doctors. He wants nothing to do with them anymore. He understands now why you hear about doctors and nurses getting ill with diseases that could have been caught. Never getting their heart checked and then dying of a heart attack, for example. When you're around sickness all day, all month, all year, you do all you can to avoid acknowledging your own.

The kid beside him reaches out his hand and squeezes Ralph's knee. Ralph jumps.

“Hey,” Ralph says. “Hey, don't do that.” He stands again and backs away from the kid.

The kid jumps up beside Ralph. He opens his mouth into a scream and points at Ralph and starts shouting. “Help,” the kid shouts. “Help!”

There he is in his red velvet slippers, far from his house, lost. His wife is sick and dying. His kids are growing up and leaving him. He has no keys, no gloves. He can't remember what he left the house to do. He probably doesn't even have his wallet. The kid screams louder.

“Quiet,” shouts Ralph. “Shush.” He wants to put his hand over the kid's mouth — the scream is piercing and hurts Ralph's ears. He wants to hold the kid down in the snow, pound on him, make him shut up. “Quiet.”

“Help. Help.”

“Terry.” A woman comes around the corner of the school. She pauses to step on her tossed cigarette as she walks towards Ralph and the kid. “Terry, leave the poor man alone.”

Ralph clutches at his heart. He holds onto it. He feels it beating hard under his jacket.

“Help,” Terry shouts. “Help, help, help.”

The woman makes her way towards them. “Sorry about that,” she shouts over Terry's screams. “He's, well, he's just different.”

“Different?” Ralph thinks, Different? Is that what they call it now?

When the woman reaches them she takes her hands out of her coat pockets and she cups Terry's ears and stands close to him, pulling his face towards hers. He is still shouting and Ralph has no idea how she can get that close and not go deaf. The woman touches her forehead to Terry's forehead and immediately he stops screaming. The silence is pure. Ralph hears a buzzing in his head, in that vacant place where the scream once was, but nothing else.

“Phew,” Ralph says.

The woman takes her hands off Terry, pulls her forehead away and Terry begins to climb the structure. He is laughing now. As if nothing happened.

“I'm really sorry about that,” the woman says. “I just went around the side of the school to light my smoke. The wind is harsh over here.” The woman shrugs.

Now Ralph wants to hit her. He wants to smack her in her cute nose, her pretty little face. Smoking. Before, when he was allowed to take Claire to the hospital for her radiation treatments, if he passed patients or doctors smoking outside the building, Ralph would say something. He would turn on them. Two times the security guards asked him to control himself and then, finally, Claire asked him not to come with her anymore.

“You make me nervous,” Claire had said. “I'm not sure what you are going to do.”

Claire has never smoked. Not once. She has always been healthy. She exercises. She lives cleanly.

The woman backs away from Ralph. He realizes his face is set in a scowl and his hands are in fists.

“Whoa,” the woman says. She puts her hands up. “Hey, what did you do to make Terry scream?”

Ralph relaxes his fists and sets his face in a partial smile so he looks more friendly. “Nothing,” he says. “I was just sitting here, minding my own business.”

The woman turns from him and watches her kid on the climbing structure. Terry is moving along the top part of it as if he's scaling the outside of an office tower. He's only about four feet up, but he holds onto the sides and moves so carefully, a look of fear on his face.

“Listen,” the woman says. She turns back to Ralph. She puts her hands on her hips and blows cold air out of her mouth in a puff. “Terry's different, sure.”