The Wife Tree (35 page)

“The days are long.”

“Do you ever get out and walk?”

“I never developed the habit. Vera suffered from obesity, then diabetes. In the end it attacked her feet. She was pretty dependent on me.”

“My walks have enabled me to re-create myself. You could join me someday if you like.”

“I think I might do that.”

“It was around Christmastime that we began to notice a change in him,” said Conte’s daughter, Betty.

The ringing of hammers had brought me outside, where I discovered that Vivien and Conte have joined the generation of deck-builders on this street. There on the driveway stood Betty, watching a handful of young men, her sons, climb over a cedar deck frame. It had gone up at the back of the house in just an hour. I came down off my porch to speak to her.

“Mom noticed the changes beginning in him months ago,” said Betty. “Rages. Confusion. Paranoia. We all ignored it, at first, thinking it was the arthritis advancing. The pain in his joints driving him up the walls.

“But then, he came in one day with a terrible headache that wouldn’t go away and after a few days he went to the doctor and they did the X-rays and eventually the CAT scan — this all took a few weeks, you understand — and they found the tumour. It couldn’t be removed. It was too big. There is nothing they can do for him. So we’ve brought him home. We want him to spend his last days here on the deck, in the sunshine. To enjoy life to the fullest every moment that he has left.”

I wanted to ask her: Does this mean he never loved me? Does this mean he never worshipped me from a corner of the house as I stepped up onto a stool to hang out my sheets on the line, beautiful, like he said, as a domestic goddess? Does it mean that he said everything he said to me and touched me the way he touched me only because of this parasite of the brain?

“The deck will be finished in a day or two,” said Betty. “Then we’ll be able to wheel him out here. We’re hoping that this new
perspective of the yard will cheer him up, give him something to focus on.”

William’s gardens, I’ve noticed, are blooming more brilliantly, more densely this summer with their ash fertilizer than anyone could have dreamed. It’s as though all his regrets and troubles and tears and anger and lust and loss and passion are forming a rich compost, nurturing the plant roots. Today I was outside admiring the coreopsis when I heard a heavy door slide open on the McTavish property. Passing through a small opening cut in the hedge by Conte to make it easier for him to visit William, I entered the McTavish yard and found Vivien sitting alone on the new deck, her posture funereal. It was clear that Conte had died. I hadn’t known. My long daily walks take me out of the neighbourhood so that I don’t notice the comings and goings of ambulances. I can no longer read the obituaries, grateful to a degree that the fine print of death is too small for my eyes to apprehend.

I climbed three steps and sat down in a plastic chair beside Vivien. She drew a small pad and a pencil from her housedress pocket, wrote something on it and handed it to me. I brought it up close to my eyes, peering through my magnifying glass.

He only sat here on the deck once. Before he died. Only once
.

I’m sorry
, I wrote back.

For a while she sat quietly with the notepad in her hand and looked across the yard. Again she picked the pencil up.

I’ve made so many mistakes
.

So have I
.

I heard a siren begin to wail in the distance and grow louder, finally turning up our street, and I knew that Harry Lang had fallen for the last time and that at that moment Heather was on her knees beside his dead body, weeping and wringing her hands and searching for his pulse and pressing her palm against his cooling cheek, even while her hair grew more silver by the second and her poodle whimpered into the crook of her arm. In the next hour, her face would age ten years and, for a while at least, she would stop smiling at Life.

It’s a beautiful day
.

Yes
.

Together on the deck, Vivien and I sat, the blind and the deaf enjoying the heat of the July sunshine on our old speckled arms. We breathed in the fruity perfume of the fresh cedar wood and felt time all around us.