Light Lifting (21 page)

“I wonder could you do something for me?”

She asked me this once, during one of those 38 degree summer days where everything gets heavier than it should be. I was sweating from the bike and my shirt was damp and sticking to me. The smell in the room was thicker than normal. You could almost see it.

“Yeah,” I said automatically. “No problem. What do you need?”

I pictured something like a bag of groceries that needed to be unloaded or a letter she wanted me to drop in the box.

“Will you look at this?” she said. “And tell me what you think I should do?”

Before I could get a hold on what was happening, she started to unbutton her blouse and to wriggle out of her sleeve and slide away the sturdy beige strap of her bra.

“Oh, no,” I said, “Don't do that.”

I turned in the opposite direction, toward the TV, but it didn't change anything.

“This isn't right at all,” she repeated, “not at all.”

It was like I was barely there and she was just looking herself over and privately keeping track of the changes in her body.

“You see how it's getting worse, don't you?” she said. “What do you think I should do? You work for the doctor's, don't you? What do you think?”

She'd pulled back her shirt far enough that I could see nearly her entire breast. It was a thin, used-up looking thing and almost the same white colour you'd link up with one of those ugly fish that live in some deep trench at the bottom of the ocean and have never seen light. The skin was crisscrossed with a purplish-blue network of veins and there were long, very long, black bristles growing around the nipple. Just below, you could see the problem – a big yellowish cyst, like the biggest pimple you can imagine, but circled in a dark red sore colour. It looked very bad, almost ready to burst and there was a shiny liquid film oozing out of it. The woman looped her index finger around the red circle and grazed over the surface in a tentative, worried kind of way.

“It hurts every time I move,” she said. “Even when I'm just sitting in my chair. I thought it was nothing at first, but it's getting bigger every day and I can hardly stand it now.”

It was the first time I'd ever seen one of those hidden parts of a woman's body – Barney's pictures didn't count for anything – and I didn't know what to do. I felt kind of dull and numb, like this was something I should have seen coming, but still couldn't prepare for. It was like when you get called up to the front of the class and they ask you to stare down the jumble of numbers and letters in a difficult math problem, but even before you stand up to go to the blackboard, you already know you can't do it, that this question is out there, beyond where you can go, and it's going to have to stay unsolved.

“I don't know,” I said to her. “You need to see a real doctor. You need to get somebody to take you to the hospital and get looked at by somebody who knows what they're doing.”

I told her I was sorry, and that all I could do was maybe check-in with the pharmacist when I got back to the store and that maybe if I described it to Musgrave and told him what it looked like, he might know what to do and maybe he would call her later on.

“Well that would be just great,” she said, happier than she should have been.

“That would be wonderful, thanks so much.”

“But it's the doctor you really need to see,” I said. “You can't forget about that. You need somebody to take you to the doctor, right, as soon as you can?”

“Oh yes, yes, dear,” she said. “I'm sure somebody will come along. No problem at all. Your Mr. Musgrave is going to call. He'll call and tell us what to do next.”

Then she pulled her shirt closed and straightened herself up and slipped the buttons back together. It was all very matter of fact. A second later, she was thanking me again for all my help and telling me to grab a few cookies out of the cupboard on the way out.

“There might be a cold pop in the fridge,” she said in a mischievous funny kind of way and that was that. One thing gave way to the next.

I worked my last day for Musgrave near the end of October, just after they turned the clocks back and everybody was still trying to adjust to the full dark coming down on them by five in the afternoon. The temperature dropped fifteen degrees in one night and there was a minefield of black ice on the side of the road. I zig-zagged across the city trying to avoid it and my eyes never moved from that spot a couple feet in front of the wheel. I'd been making my preparations for winter for the last few weeks and the fingertips were already cut out of my gloves and I was dressed in layers. All through September, it had been wet and rainy and my back tire had been kicking up a brown line of spray. Every coat I owned had this skunk-stripe of filth running down from my neck to the base of my spine.

When I made the turn to Barney's, the sky was still a little bit grey with leftover light. He was getting his standard package of canned goods and insulin and the little strips he used to test his sugar levels. There was a refill for his blood pressure medication and a roll of paper towels and a package of disposable razors. He'd already made his move off the porch and into the TV room where he normally sat with the remote in his hand and his legs spread wide over the velour cushions. I went up the stairs and knocked on the door and I called out to him, telling him that his stuff was here and that he better come and get it.

There was no sound from inside and I think that was the first sign I had that things were going to change. Barney was never not at home. I rang again and I rattled the front door a bit and I told him I'd just leave the package on the porch if he didn't want to pick it up. His inside door, the real wooden door, was wide open and there was nothing to keep me from just poking my head in and looking around, but I had those lines in my head and I stuck to the rules. I went over to the big front window and cupped my hands up against the side of my head and stared through the glass like a kid at an aquarium.

I saw Barney on the other side. He was still wearing his nylon shorts and his Hawaiian shirt, but he was down on the floor now, piled up in a fleshy lump and surrounded by newspapers and old magazines and take-out food wrappers. One of his arms was bent back at an angle that didn't seem right and his head was turned away from me so I couldn't tell if his eyes were open or closed. There was a bowl of Ravioli turned over near his head and the grainy red meat sauce was seeping into the carpet. It looked like all the hard stuff, all the bone and the muscle, had been sucked out of his body. The Medic Alert necklace was resting on the coffee table where he must have put it before he started eating and the steady red light kept blinking on and off like nothing was wrong.

My first thought was just to leave him there. I had my nose pushed up against the glass and I was only a foot away, but I couldn't shake this feeling in my stomach that this was how Barney did it. This was his master trick, his secret way of getting kids into his house.

“Barney,” I yelled and I banged on the glass with my fist. “Get up. It's not going to work. I'm not coming in there.”

But nothing came back from him. The shouting and the banging on the window didn't even send a ripple through him. I walked over to the door and I opened it again and stared in at him. The greasy smell of the house came outside, but there was no sound and no movement. His body was just a thing, like a pile of laundry in the middle of the room, as still as the furniture. I think it was that stillness that got me. I was sure you couldn't fake it. A person just couldn't hold themselves forever like that. You couldn't do it on purpose.

I said his name again. I said “Barney” and I crossed over. It was like stepping out of an airplane.

Everything happened quickly after that. I walked over to the end table and pushed the red flashing Medic Alert button a couple times. Then it was only the two of us. I went over to Barney and rolled him over onto his back. His eyes were closed and everything had gone limp. Even the shape of his face was different and you wouldn't have recognized him. There was nothing left to hold him up from the inside and I didn't know what I should do. His body lumped in front of me like the low, half-built wall of a kid's snow fort, big enough so you could duck down and hide behind it. He was way larger than I realized and much softer and his skin was cooler than I thought it would be. There was a thin, white paste coming from his mouth and the head of his penis had flopped out of his twisted shorts. I put my ear down on his chest and felt his hair pushing against my cheek. I listened for a rattle or some kind of breath coming from way down inside of him and I ran my fingers around his neck trying to feel for the thudding or just a little surge of anything that might still be flowing through him.

I didn't have any training, but I set myself up for the kind of CPR I had seen on television. I tilted Barney's head back so his chin was pointed straight at the ceiling and I tried to flatten everything else out, his arms and his legs. I wanted to make sure all those hoses and pipes that I imagined running inside of him would be in line. Then I just did it and I put myself through a set of actions that would have been impossible to imagine five minutes earlier and were now just as impossible to avoid. I pinched Barney's nostrils together and brought my mouth down until my lips came right up against his. I held back for maybe half a second and then pushed down even harder until I had a tight seal over his mouth. It was simple after that. I blew my air into his lungs, sucking the oxygen out of myself and forcing it down into him. The taste of the ravioli and the beer and the white paste were still there in his mouth and I thought I might throw up when I lifted my head to pull in another clean breath. But then I went back down and I gave him two more breaths, as full as I could make them. Then I moved over to the middle of his chest and put my fingers together so my hands came down almost like one plunger pushing down on his round chest, squeezing at his heart ten or twelve or maybe fifteen times before I had to go back to the head and blow into him again. As I shuffled back and forth on my knees, moving just a couple inches from the top of Barney to the middle of him, it hit me that this was all it took. A person just needed the air to go in and go out and the essential liquids to go around and around. This was how they did it. This was how they kept your life going at the worst of times, by blowing it in and pushing it around and forcing it all the way through your body even if you didn't want or deserve it.

Everything worked exactly like it's supposed to. I kept it up with Barney for maybe five minutes, taking turns blowing and pushing, and then I heard the sirens. The ambulance stopped in front of the house and the flashing purple and red lights came in through the window. I looked over at the necklace again. It was still there, resting on the end table, still blinking on and off. I couldn't believe it had actually done what it was supposed to do. It was just a brown plastic circle in the middle of a beige plastic square with a piece of string attached to it and it didn't look like it had been cared for well enough to work. Then they were inside, an older guy and a younger woman wearing dark blue baseball caps, and they took over.

“Family?” the woman said to me as she unzipped her gym bag and started pulling out her gear.

“No,” I said.

“How long have you been at it, approximately?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Five minutes, no more than that.” She snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and took out a syringe and stuck it in a little vial and filled it halfway up with a clear liquid. Then, without any hesitation, without even changing the expression on her face, she found her spot and drove that needle right into Barney's arm and pushed down on the plunger with her thumb.

The man kept muttering to himself as he fiddled around with the wires and tried to untangle the paddles on his portable defibrillator.

“They never pack this right,” he mumbled to his partner. There was a flat, bored sound in the way he talked and she just nodded her head and said the guys on the night shift were always like that.

It took him maybe fifteen seconds to get everything straight. And then it was just like you'd expect. The man pressed the paddles onto Barney's bare chest and the woman put her straight arm against my body to make sure I was standing far enough away. The man said “clear,” very quietly as if there was really no one to warn, and then he sent a shock wave into Barney. It wasn't as loud as I expected. Just a sizzling sound and it made a kind of burning smell, but nothing happened. Then he said “clear” again and gave him another blast and that was the one that did it. Just like jumping a car after the lights have been left on all night. This big shiver went all the way through Barney's body and his face suddenly came back to its normal shape and he took in this enormous breath like he was coming back to the top of the lake after being under too long. He started coughing hard and spitting up. The woman rubbed her hand on his chest and she looked straight into his eyes. Then she looped an elastic band around the back of his head to hold the oxygen mask in place and she turned the dial on a little tank to set the gas flowing. She shined a little pen flashlight into his eyes and started talking to him in this very slow, calm voice. She told him there'd been an accident, a cardiac event. But now everything was going to be okay. His signs were looking good, she said, and they were going to take him to the hospital.