Waiting For Sarah (2 page)

“What do you want?” he shouted back.

“Could you open the door?”

He opened the door. A dark man, flat face, black hair and eyebrows, long olive-green raincoat, heavy briefcase, showed his ID. “I'm the district teacher for the home-bound, Mike.” He smiled. “I'd like to talk to you about school assignments.”

“Don't need any assignments.”

“Could I come in so we can talk?” He took half a step forward.

“No!” Mike slammed the door and the man went away.

He came back the next day. “It's Mr. Taylor,” he said through the closed door. “I have to talk to you, Mike.”

“Drop dead!”

“Open this door!” Mr. Taylor said firmly.

Mike told him to go away in language that curled the paint off the door.

Mr. Taylor left.

He told Norma that evening. “Makes no sense,” he said. “Who cares about school? Who cares about graduating? It's all such a pointless waste of time.”

Norma didn't argue, but left him alone with his thoughts. She went out to work, cooked his meals, cleaned his room of sour smells and dust and did his laundry. In the evenings when she got home from work she invariably found him in his wheelchair at the window, staring out at the city towers and the North Shore mountains.

He stares out the window at the city towers and North Shore mountains, remembering his mother, who is standing and smiling, eyes closed, face raised to the sun. Birds come to her and flock about her and alight on her hands and shoulders and brush her face with their wings. It is only an image, one he has dreamed up probably, but it seems true all the same.

He remembers her as she was on the day of the accident. His father and Becky are still upstairs. It is very early in the morning. Birds sing in the trees and gardens. His mother wears her blue track suit — the one Dad got her for Christmas. Already she has been out for her daily run along the sea wall and is now working in the kitchen, peeling and chopping, preparing food so their supper will be ready when they get back home from the annual air show. It is to be a curried carrot-parsnip soup and lentil sambar. His mother enjoys cooking. Mike can see the recipe names in her cookbook spread out in front of her on the counter, its pages marked with more than a dozen yellow Post-It notes. The radio plays music.
As she works, she frequently looks out the window at the birds in her patio feeder — mostly finches in the summer, sparrows and starlings in the winter. Because of the music she hasn't heard him, doesn't know he is behind her, leaning in the doorway, stealing some of her pleasure as she gathers up the bright promise of the August morning with the work and smell of the food and the sight and sounds of the birds.

His thoughts leap ahead to the day's end, when they are driving home from the Abbotsford Air Show, and then the accident and the three of them dead, and he thinks of the soup and the lentils in their pots, waiting forever, as the empty house grows dark and the birds stop their singing.

There were support services, from Rehab mainly, counselors and therapists of various kinds. Like the visiting teacher, they came, but Mike refused to open the door to them. He told them to go away. The visiting teacher came again, but by now Mike wasn't answering the door or the telephone; he was closing his bedroom door and keeping his silence, pretending he was out.

Occasionally he stayed in bed all day, doing nothing, and Norma would come home to find him curled up in a fetal position under the covers, or lying — still in his pajamas — with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. He had very little to say, never asking his aunt how she was or how her workday had gone, nothing. He had no interest in anybody or anything.

The walls of the apartment were becoming badly marked with scuffs and scrapes from the wheelchair and he was forever dropping glasses and plates. Norma pretended not to notice; according to the therapists it was all a part of Mike's adjustment.

He continued in this way for several months. When Norma's friends came to the apartment for coffee and gossip Mike went to his room and closed the door. Sometimes Norma visited with other residents of the building, leaving a telephone number for Mike in case he needed her. He never did, even though he usually fell once or twice a day, in the bathroom usually, or sometimes from his wheelchair in the kitchen as he reached up to cupboards or shelves, then rescued himself with loud and angry curses.

She surprised him one evening by inviting a friend, a pastor from the church. Mike knew what she was up to all right; this was obviously his aunt's attempt to smuggle in a dose of spiritual guidance. The pastor's name was Samuel Butterworth, and he tried to get Mike to talk about himself and the accident. He had silver-gray hair, wore small, round glasses and had the kind of twinkling blue eyes that invited confidences. Mike refused to talk to him, turning his back rudely and wheeling away to his room.

Another evening Norma invited the woman from across the hall for herb tea. Mrs. Dhaliwal — Norma called her Dolly — had been Norma's friend for many years, ever since (Norma later explained to Mike) it had fallen to Norma to deal with co-op neighbors' complaints against the Dhaliwal family concerning the strong smell of curry on the third floor.

Dolly Dhaliwal was short and plump and wore a bright flowing sari, mostly green and red, and brought with her not only the herb tea and a plate of sticky cakes but also a painted wooden box containing cards,
dice, coins, incense, tiny bottles of oils, medallions, glass pyramids and other esoteric articles, all with the intention of foretelling Norma's future.

Mike, attracted to the cakes like a wasp to jam, stayed for tea. The aroma of the tea caused the apartment to smell like an eastern temple. Dolly began, not with Norma, but with Mike, surprising him by grasping his right palm, raising it to within a few inches of her sharp brown nose and staring down into it for several seconds. Then she said, “You have a yellow and green aura about you; lines here are full of joy. I see a wonderful future for you. Someone will come and bring you great happiness. You will see. It will be soon.”

Mike didn't believe in clairvoyance or prophecy or any of Mrs. Dhaliwal's arts. It was all rubbish as far as he was concerned. “Thanks for the valuable information, Mrs. Dhaliwal,” he said, not bothering to conceal the sneer in his voice. “It's good to know what a wonderful future I've got coming.” He took the last cake from the plate on the table and went off to his room.

Later, after Mrs. Dhaliwal had gone, Norma was angry. “You were not very polite.”

“I don't believe all that fortune-telling stuff; it's stupid.”

“It's just for fun. There's no harm in it.”

“It's phony. Except for the cakes; they were okay.”

“You took too many.”

He shrugged. “So what. Lighten up.”

“You don't have to be so discourteous to my friends, Mike. That's all I'll say. The matter's now closed.”

“How did you solve the problem of the curry smell?”

“Dolly solved it herself, by baking delicious little treats for the entire third floor — samosas and gulab jamans. There isn't one person who can resist them. Once people got to know Dolly and like her, well, the problem was solved.”

Norma drove him out to the Burnaby cemetery so he could see the grave. The day was cold and crisp under a blue sky. She pushed him along the path between the headstones. A thin layer of frost on the grass had started to melt. He helped push his chair onto the grass. Norma had brought flowers, chrysanthemums, which she placed on the grave, removing those withered by frost.

He stared at the granite stone and the names of his family: “Died August 15, 1998.” His eyes stung.

“It was a lovely funeral,” said Norma. “The Reverend Butterworth read the eulogy. So nice. Everyone was there — Robbie, the kids from Carleton High and Sanderson Elementary — looked to me like every kid in the neighborhood turned out — and teachers, and people from the school board. ‘Tell Mike to hang in there,' they said. You were in people's minds. It was like you were there with us, Mike.”

He said nothing, thinking. Then he said, “How come if there were so many kids at the funeral none of them came to see me in the hospital?”

Norma was surprised. “But they did! You were always sleeping, or perhaps you don't remember because of the painkillers. The nurses allowed only
two people at one time and had to send many of them away. You sent many of them away yourself. Do you remember?”

He shook his head, then thought for a while longer and said, “So there was a big crowd at the funeral?”

“Enormous. There were women from MADD — Mothers Against Drunk Driving. A very sincere group of women, I'm sure, but to tell you the truth I could have done without the TV cameras.”

On the drive home Norma wondered aloud why he had never asked about his home, their three-bedroom townhouse on Fairview Slopes, the one they had moved into when Mike was only five, the place where Becky was born.

“Who cares about a house!”

“It was your home, Mike. Anyway, there were mortgage payments. So I arranged for it to be sold. You should know that there's a small equity from the sale and a small amount from insurance. It's in trust for when you reach eighteen.”

He shrugged. He didn't care about the money.

“And I had a few things put in storage. One or two pieces of furniture Joanne was fond of. And your father's stuff — golf clubs, medals, his computer hardware; it's all there if you ever decide to use it. I couldn't deal with it, so just had everything boxed and stored. You might feel like going through it after a little time has passed. I kept some things from your room separate — your posters and CDs, things like that; they're stored in my locker in the co-op basement if you decide you want them.”

He said nothing; he was thinking of gravestones.

He really did care about his home, sold now, which meant that everything was gone. His whole life was gone, like a torpedoed ship at the bottom of the sea, leaving him a lone survivor in an empty ocean with nothing to cling to — except for Norma and Robbie. Dolly Dhaliwal and her “wonderful future” indeed!

He remembered his room. And Becky's. And downstairs, the worn living-room carpeting and shabby sofa his mother talked about replacing, but never did. The family eating together in the evenings. Rules and arguments about behavior and chores and the Internet and TV watching. Ordinary lives that were meant to go on in an ordinary way for many years, but were now just memories.

“Why is this building so damn noisy?” he asked Norma one afternoon.

Norma pulled a face. “It's the workmen mending leaks in the building. You must have noticed the blue tarps around the outside. They shouldn't be here more than a month or so.”

The din of hammers, saws and drills seemed
louder in the second week. “I hate this place,” he said.

Norma hid her hurt feelings. “The work will soon be finished.”

“Why have you got leaks? Why is it taking so long? What's the matter with this damn place anyway?” He noticed his aunt flinch, but didn't care.

“Moisture gets through the siding and rots the drywall. We sued the developer. It has taken two whole years to make them do repairs.” Norma watched Mike's face as she explained. It was the first interest he had shown in anything in a long time — a negative interest, but a positive sign, she reckoned.

One evening after supper, when she noticed him staring trance-like at the pattern in the tablecloth, she said, “Don't be so hard on yourself, Mike.”

He looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“I know how much you miss your parents and Becky. But the accident was just that: an accident. None of it was your fault.”

“Yes, but ...” He shook his head. His eyes glistened with angry tears. “Why should they be gone, while I ...?”

She grasped his hands. “Sometimes there are no answers, Mike. Life is like that: a puzzle. But God has reasons for everything, even if we don't understand. Your mother and I were very close, almost like twins. I miss her very much also, and Becky and your father. You are Joanne's son and you're a fine brave boy, Mike. But your mom and dad and Becky are no longer here with us. You've got to let them go.”

He shook his head and wheeled away to his room.

He started going out alone, away from the constant noise of the builders. The din made him angry; there was no peace. He pushed his wheelchair along the hallway, around and over the obstacle course of the contractor's equipment, and took the elevator down from the third floor, where he had to maneuver his chair around ladders, building materials, ropes and tarps in the entrance lobby. Then he wheeled himself along the sea wall to the marina at Stamps Landing. It was quiet there, with only the tinkling conversations of bells on sailboat masts breaking the silence. He sat and watched the lazy activity in the marina and the silent boat traffic in False Creek, which isn't a creek at all but an inlet from the sea. But even here he found no peace.

Weekends, Norma offered to push him all the way to the Granville Island Market, but his friend Robbie took over that job instead. Mike enjoyed his outings with Robbie.

Norma brought up the subject of the support
services. “You must be reasonable, Mike. Your therapy wasn't finished when you left Rehab; there's still much that can be done. Dr. Ryan says you should have prosthet — ”

“Ryan's a jerk. I don't need anybody poking at me and asking questions.”

“Mike, Rehab calls me at work. They're worried about you. As well as Dr. Ryan there's a physiotherapist named Finch, and a man named Taylor from the School Board who complains that you won't open the door. What am I supposed to do?”