Street Symphony (15 page)

You can’t make the world a better place just by living in it, his granddad always said. There has to be action. His mother admired his soft hands while his dad in the background muttered about real work and talked proudly about his better son, the doctor. But Leo knew that he was doing actual good. As for her, what did she do? Tutor the backward, care for her son. Change words from one language to another. Well okay, it wasn’t a selfish life, but it was small.

He had an urge to know where she lived. A house or an apartment? Would someone greet her at the door? He wanted her to have a persistent shooting pain in some part of her body that the doctors would “treat” uselessly with painkillers. Then she would turn up on his doorstep saying, “Help me please, Leo,” and he would have the option of saying yes or not now, I’m busy. He would choose special music for her. He’d tried playing CDs of Pachelbel, Debussy, Chopin in the sanctuary while he worked, but the people who came to him, even the older ones, responded better to movie soundtracks:
Shrek
or
I Am Sam
, even
Mamma Mia
.

“Owen is doing fine,”
Rebecca said
to everyone
who asked. “Don and I take turns to go out in the evening, but in a month or so –” In a month or so. Yes, he would be walking better and able perhaps to drive, but the shock had left him fragile. That man, mentioning him, had touched a wound. She didn’t want his fingers on her body or her mind. Leo, with his smooth ways, was one big construct. She’d seen through him right away and was sorry that so many people she knew were taken in by him.

She listened politely when Carrie, Janice or Bren told her she should go to him –
He’s amazing, he could do so much for you, it’s not just about the body
– but then moved on to another topic. Anyway she had Don now. Middle-aged romance. Both of them close to fifty. Unexpected. And next week, they would go away. Jenny was coming home to look after her brother for a whole week. She tried to hum the notes of the concerto as she walked along. It was suddenly dark. The streetlight had been out for days, and no one had fixed it. She heard steps. Someone was gaining on her. She moved faster, trying not to run.

~ • ~

The damn woman was striding on
and his shoes weren’t made for this. He hurried. She stopped at the crosswalk to wait for the light to change. Leo caught up to her and put his hand on her shoulder. She screamed and ran across the road, a car veered, the driver leant on his horn. She
made it to the far curb and tripped and fell. He should have rushed over to help her but was afraid. How could he explain being there? His reasons for following her were, really, irrational. He dodged into a driveway and hid behind a rhododendron bush before he looked back to make sure she was all right. A person was bending over her, helping her to stand up. Maybe there would be a little damage and she would, finally, need to call him. He waited there, damp leaves dripping onto his jacket, watched a man emerge from the house and help her up the steps, till finally it was safe to creep out onto the road and then walk back the way he’d come.

~ • ~

Carrie was lying flat, face down on his table,
and Leo was applying pressure to her thigh.

“Just being here makes me feel better,” she said.

“Well, I’m fortunate to be able to help.”

“We’re having a fundraiser on the twenty-eighth. For cancer research. It’s at the arts centre. Everybody will be there. I’d love for you to come.”

“I’d like to, as long as I’m not called away.”

“There’ll be drinks and food.”

He looked at the woman, at the soft, overindulged flesh, and wanted to jab down into her sciatic nerve and make her yelp. Sometimes he did feel stirrings, a desire to leap onto the prone, available body, but his brain always shouted
Stop!
He feared that one day it might not. A chaste and merely affectionate embrace had led to great trouble in Elsewhere.

When she was putting her shoes on, he asked, “How’s your friend Rebecca?”

“Fine,” Carrie replied. And said not one word more. Not a single word. Instead of the usual
Well her son’s improving, and she and Don are going to have a weekend away and, and, and.
Nothing!

He almost choked as he prevented himself from saying,
But she fell in the street after the concert. She must have been hurt.

Carrie smiled, paid him and left.

He couldn’t believe it. That hostile woman, Rebecca, had told her friends not to talk to him about her. He could feel her animosity, even here in his own sanctuary, when she was across town tending to her damaged son, or lying on her couch with a broken ankle or arm. She’d sown doubt into her friends’ minds:
He’s a gossip. Don’t tell him anything.
And before you could say knife, it would spread and his devoted clients would be asking to see his credentials, as if he, Leo Chardy, needed worthless certificates issued by some band of know-nothings to say that he was a qualified chiropractor. “That’s not what I am,” he always replied when asked. “I’m simply a healer.” He went into the kitchen and Margo wasn’t there. Counters, stovetop, all clean. No sign of cooking. He called out. No reply. The world, his world, was becoming unstrung.

~ • ~

Janice had called and given her Leo’s phone number.
“He’s a magician,” she said. “He can help you. He did wonders for my back.” Rebecca thanked her and ignored the number. The cast was due to come off her wrist next week. It had been a nuisance, that break, but she couldn’t help seeing it as a blessing in disguise as she watched Owen put the lettuce into the salad dryer and pull the string with a flourish. Bringing her cups of coffee, helping in the kitchen, had restored some of his confidence. He was no longer hiding under the cloak of invalidism. That awful, heavy hand landing on her shoulder had brought about a seesaw effect. She was down and her son was up.

Don was making spaghetti with tuna and he said, not for the first time, “Watching for you and I saw that guy. Then the car came and he totally disappeared. No more walking in the dark alone.”

~ • ~

Without telling him, but now she was telling him,
standing there in the sanctuary, Margo had made plans to set up shop on her own. “I’ve seen what you do, Leo. You make them into needy people. You suck on their souls.”

“That’s not it! That’s not it!” he shouted. “I heal them.”

“Most of them’d get over those aches and pains anyway if they did a few exercises.”

He pushed her against the table. “I’ll show you,” he said.

She slapped his face. “You’re nothing but a Wizard of Oz. You make it up as you go along, just like him. I’ll be moving my stuff over the weekend.”

Let her go. Let her go
, his mind urged. But he ran after her to shake her and make her see sense. There couldn’t be two of them in this town. He’d give her more money, more love. Whatever it took.

“Noooo,” he cried as he fell over the bag she’d left in the doorway. “My knee!”

He thought he heard her laughing, but she came to him and, with a ghost of his own sympathetic smile, looked down at him and said, “I’m sure I’ll be able to help you. I’ve been taking lessons.”

It’s Christmas, Eve

Eve sat by the fire, staring at fake flames.
If she moved…but
she would not move. Remaining in petrified stillness was the only way to prevent the ghost of Christmas present from invading her space with its glittering gifts and sugar-filled jollity. The whole town out there was wearing one large paper hat on its head, grease from the turkey dripping down its collective chin as it belched out ho-ho-ho. All Shostakovich could do, all the noise he could make with his Seventh Symphony, couldn’t drown out the persistence of “Silent Night”. Behind the cellos and the brass, they were there, the choirs, the shiny-faced boys and girls, the serious men and women, making it known that this was their season: the time for people of goodwill to rejoice. She kicked at the antique toasting fork leaning against the fireplace and it fell onto the brass trivet.

There was no point in trying to keep Darren out. He was in the kitchen pouring wine, his grinning face was reflected in the shiny globes she’d strung across the mantel, his hand was shaking the tinsel round the framed print, then reaching for the remote to find the sports channel. Dammit! She could almost see his red-booted foot dangling down the chimney. “No, I haven’t trimmed the tree,” she shouted, and refrained from calling it a
fucking tree
because it was Christmas.

In the picture by the window, Brueghel’s stiff-limbed figures, their blades attached to shoes or boots, were frozen in time. Her elegant skates were a modern miracle of leather and plastic and steel. Were those men and women and kids gliding on the ice going to their simple homes to drink mulled wine? Or were they on their way to the church in the background to pray? There was snow in that old scene, but there was no
Winter Landscape
in this part of the province. Outside, it was dark and rainy.

For three Decembers, since the death of happiness, the death of love and of truth, the screaming, abominable, terrible, unwarranted death, she’d lied and opted out of the great puddingy feast. “You must come to us,” friends said. “You can’t, must not, should not, be on your own at Christmas.” They offered her a bed for the night too so that she could drink wine. “I won’t be alone,” she’d replied. In year one, she’d gone to “a spa on the Mainland”. Year two had been a “visit with in-laws in Ontario”. This year? Well this year “cousin Joanne” had decided to come over from Australia. The landline rang unanswered. Her smart phone was under the pillow in the bedroom and her precious iPad lay neglected on the bookshelf by the fireplace. She’d put a blanket over the TV as if it were a parrot that needed sleep. Silent day, silent evening. Peace. Christmas was surely about peace.

At the funeral, on that day, December 17, Francie and Don had told her she must come to spend Christmas with them in Winnipeg. And Thanksgiving. And perhaps a week’s visit in summer too. The boys were growing up and needed to get to know their only aunt. This sudden outpouring of invitations had only made Eve weepily resistant. “Thank you, sister. That’s very kind of you. We’ll be in touch.” And they were, but in weeks the “touches” had reverted to their former cool infrequence. Francie’s and Don’s attitude to Darren had been snobbish and unkind. And she couldn’t tell them they were right, and that his “Look, it was only the one time, honey” had been a big lie. On this year’s card, she’d made a move towards
entente
by saying she hoped to see them soon, and her gift of wine would bring a response of surprised gratitude.

Her closest friends, she refused to say a childish “best”, couldn’t understand why she preferred to spend this Christmas alone with a cousin she’d never mentioned to them and hadn’t seen in twenty years. “Bring her with you”, Ted and Julie said. “We’ve always room for one more, and you plus cousin plus our nine will only make eleven round the table.” But Joanne, she told them, was quiet, nay reclusive, and had her own mourning to endure. They would shed a few tears and laugh about childhood memories over a modest dinner of chicken and sweet potato pie.
I must have told you about her. She spent a lot of time working with aboriginal people in New Zealand. She’ll arrive with too much luggage, expensive gifts, and then go out of my life again like a comet.

There was a chocolate Santa on the mantel, softening in the heat, because there had always been chocolate. Two empty stockings lay on the hearth. There had always been stockings. The tree was live but small and purposely undecorated. Last night, Santa had drunk the glass of wine and nibbled the shortbread cookie. Darren’s last audible words as he lay there opting out of everything had been to ask if the house was ready for the Great Day. All his boyhood traditions had to be observed every year. And he would have gone on bringing in a live tree, inviting friends for wassail and carols, in his sixties, seventies, eighties, even nineties. People live longer than ever now, so they say. And he would have kept on shouting his joyous “It’s Christmas, Eve!” forever.

Have you finished your shopping? Starting in early December, even strangers felt impelled to ask this, let alone the group at the office. She always replied yes because she sent cash to her three nephews, promised a meal out to Jenny and Don, and gave Jane, the receptionist, a box of icewine chocolates. At least this Christmas, she’d been able to go out. The two previous years, supposedly elsewhere, she’d had to shop for food in distant parts of town and make sure there were no lights showing at the front of the house. Cowering, cowardly, in the kitchen, she’d heard her late mother’s voice roaring reproachfully, “Why aren’t you out there, serving meals to the homeless? They need a dinner too.”
Next year, Mom, I promise. And I do volunteer at the hospital gift shop and play piano at the senior residence. So there!

Darren’s dying had been hard and slow. Through the first weeks of Advent, she’d sat beside him listening to his vague words, his painful breath, as he gradually lost all marks of age and became a smooth-faced monument to tranquillity. She winced at the memory of the doctor’s hand on her shoulder.
I’m sorry.
Outside in the corridor there were shouts of “Happy Christmas”. Santa went on by to the kids’ ward, a sack over his shoulder. A cup of tea appeared in front of her. She was led away as a voice murmured, “He was too young.” And all the screams had been hers.