A Year Less a Day (6 page)

A month of intense therapy has taken its toll on both of them, and Ruth tries hard to hold back the tears each time she sees him off with his neatly packed overnight bag, hoping it will be the last time he'll have to go. But hope cuts both ways, and she vacillates between hoping he'll suffer little and die quickly, and hoping he'll outlive his prognosis, despite the misery he may endure in the meantime.

“I'll be fine,” he'd assured her the first morning as she desperately clung to him at the curbside in the thin dawn light.

They really couldn't afford the cab, but Jordan wouldn't hear of her leaving the café to drive him into the heart of the city at rush hour. “Cindy can't do breakfast
on her own,” he'd said, “and you'd barely get back in time for lunch.”

“I'll visit you this evening,” she'd promised, perking herself up as she'd helped him into the taxi.

Jordan's face had dropped. “It'll just make things harder for me, Ruth. You'll come all that way and I'll be asleep, or you'll get upset.”

“I don't mind ...”

“I do, Ruth ... I mind. I don't want you remembering me hooked up to a machine. Besides, the evening girls will have their boyfriends in and turn the place into a rave joint if you're not watching them. I'll phone, OK? And it's only a few days.”

“But, I can't ...” she'd started.

He'd shushed her with a finger to her lips, and she hadn't asked again. Each week thereafter he had quietly slipped out of the apartment's rear door when her back was turned, like a womanizer on a date.

“I didn't want you getting upset,” he would tell her when he'd phoned as promised, as he had done each week, his watery voice trying to lighten their short conversation with a “doctor” joke. “The doctor said I had to drink plenty of liquids,” he'd laughed one night, “and I asked him if that meant I had to give up drinking solids.” Then, after two or three days, he'd arrive back, struggle up the stairs, and barely hit the bed before falling asleep.

The nights without Jordan's comforting presence are an awful prelude to the future, but during the day, Ruth has found new zeal. Trina started it. She's a home care nurse whose patients always die, though only once was it her fault. Generally, by the time she gets them, they've been hacked about and patched up beyond endurance
and are simply awaiting the inevitable. Trina's greatest contribution to their well-being is her unintentional ability to make them laugh as she changes incontinence pads and colostomy bags, and her only culpable failure occurred when she dropped the contents of a fully loaded bag on the aging patient's cat. “Oh, crap!” she'd cried, and the bag's owner had laughed himself to death at the sight of the shit-covered creature racing around the room like a greased pig, with Trina in hot pursuit.

It was Trina who'd brought light into Ruth's dark world. She knows about Jordan; she'd guessed—not the specifics, but enough to force Ruth's hand one morning when Jordan was away, getting his “fix,” as he called it.

Trina had blustered into the café's kitchen in search of a condom for Cindy, and found Ruth in tears. Ruth's snivelled claim of “onions,” as she wiped her nose and gestured to her baking table lacked credibility. Trina's culinary creations may have included such unlikely exotics as “creamed cabbage cheesecake with oyster sauce,” but even she knew that cherry tarts rarely contained onions.

“It's Jordan, isn't it?” Trina had correctly surmised as she threw her arm partway around Ruth's shoulders.

Ruth had easily capitulated. The crushing weight of dealing with Jordan's illness without family assistance was overpowering. In any case, she'd told herself, it was just a matter of time before Trina would be calling professionally.

“Please don't tell anyone,” she had begged Trina, before tearfully explaining Jordan's condition.

Trina had cheerfully leapt to Ruth's aid—here was someone to rescue who wouldn't defecate all over the bedsheets or drop dead at her feet—and she started immediately.

“Just take a look at you,” she'd fussed, dabbing at Ruth's swollen eyes with a tea towel, and taking out her makeup. “You're going to have to pep yourself up and give Jordan something to live for.”

“I know, Trina.”

“And you need to take care of yourself. It's no good you getting sick as well.”

“I will, Trina.”

“And look at your clothes. There's room for me in there as well. You look like my husband's blow-up doll did when I got jealous and stuck her with a hypodermic.”

Ruth had laughed for the first time in more than a month, and her new found mentor laughed with her, then Trina stopped and pulled a face at the clock. “Shit. I'm late for work again,” she'd said, heading for the door. “I'll be back. You're taking this evening off.”

“Wait a minute,” Ruth had called. “Why the hell does Cindy want a condom?”

“Don't worry,” Trina had shouted, “it's probably too late now.”

It's two days to Jordan's birthday and he returns from his treatment to be met by a new woman. Trina has worked a miracle, thanks to Marcie, her next-door neighbour. Marcie is a large woman who suffers from a compulsive possessive disorder, and she plunders oversized-fashion houses with as much abandon as a welfare mom in a thrift store giveaway. But, like all addicts, Marcie has remorseful periods, and it hadn't taken much for Trina to trigger a guilt attack and help her clear some closet space.

“You look nice,” says Jordan returning from his latest “fix,” and Ruth smiles as she helps him up the stairs to his bedroom. She has long since moved her bed into
the apartment's sitting room, so as not to disturb him morning and night, and even reinstated the Internet subscription, though she is careful not to catch sight of the screen in his room.

“Thanks, Trina,” says Ruth, when she has skipped back downstairs to the waiting woman. “I think he liked it,” she adds, pirouetting in her new size sixteen Alfred Sung from the Marcie collection.

“Great! And we haven't even started yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“See what I've got for you,” Trina says, holding out a complimentary pass to Fitness World. “Three months' free trial,” she adds enthusiastically. “We're going to have you looking absolutely great. I've even gotten you an appointment with my manicurist.”

But Ruth breaks down again. “Why, Trina? What's the point?”

“Look. If Jordan sees you're upbeat and looking forward to the future it'll give him more optimism. Believe me, Ruth, determination is everything. If he loses the will to carry on ...”

Jordan's birthday seems more of a stumbling block than the final milestone in his life, as he props himself up in bed and forces himself to open the few birthday cards. Sentiments such as, “Happy 40th and many more of them,” leave Ruth blubbering again, but Jordan takes her hand.

“It's all right, Ruth. I understand.”

Ruth's carefully chosen card accompanies a bottle of Jordan's favourite whisky—the only gift she could find that didn't have “Guaranteed for life,” stamped on it. She had sought something really special; something that he would cherish for the rest of his time, but as she
cruised the stores in search of the perfect gift, she became more and more despondent. The thought of Jordan saying, “Thanks. It'll come in handy after I've gone,” only heightened her melancholy. She'd finally given up and bought the whisky when she'd found herself reflecting on the irony of Jordan being outlived by a set of plastic handled screwdrivers made in China.

The digital camera was another matter. Its purpose was so disturbingly evident that she had twice carted it back to the store. In their nine years together, Jordan has avoided being photographed with as much fervour as an aborigine worried about the theft of his soul. Even their wedding album has vanished. “I think mom's got it,” Jordan had claimed vaguely when Ruth was turning the apartment inside out, but he had never asked for it back.

Jordan's final birthday may be Ruth's only remaining chance to obtain a lasting impression, and she imagines herself peppering a wall with his images, much as she did with the man she idolized as her progenitor. Until her marriage to Jordan, the belief that George Harrison was her father was the only solid ground in her life and, as a teen, she'd lain on her bed for hours studying the features and creases of his sharply chiselled face with the fervour of an evangelist facing Christ, planning for the joyous day they would finally meet.

In Ruth's childhood reveries, George would dash out of one of the many posters on her wall, gather her into his arms, and lavish on her everything due to a newly discovered daughter—her own suite of furnished rooms in each of his mansions; a red Ferrari; a personal chef, perhaps; and, above all, a bodyguard.

“You just wait,” she'd hiss to her tormentors at school recess, though she wisely never completed the sentence.

Like all children, Ruth sometimes doubted her parentage, though never once imagined that she was adopted or fathered by the mailman. Her misgivings centred solely around whether George Harrison would be prepared to admit his culpability. But, at such moments, she would peer deeply into his eyes and convince herself that all she needed to do was to cross the Atlantic and present herself at his front door.

Photographing Jordan turns out to be easier than Ruth could have imagined. In fact, once he's toyed with the camera, he appears quite keen, even showing her how to paste pictures directly onto the computer monitor. Nevertheless, Ruth has qualms as she quickly clicks off a few shots, feeling that she is forcing him to acknowledge the inevitability of his demise when she should be giving him hope.

“We should invite your mother over for tea, Jordan,” she suggests lightly, taking advantage of his tractable mood, and hoping to offload some of her burden.

“I don't think so.”

But Ruth has been winding herself up for this moment, hoping to cheer Jordan with a little afternoon celebration in the café. “I really think you should to tell your mother,” she says determinedly, as she reaches for the phone.

Jordan stays her hand. “Please ... Not yet,” he says. “You know what she's like—she'll worry.”

“Why shouldn't she worry ...” starts Ruth, but stops herself with the realization she is uncharitably thinking her mother-in-law will be more worried about losing her investment in the café than losing her son. “Oh, it's up to you. She's your bloody mother,” she says, letting Jordan take the phone. “I just wish I had a mother.”

“Not if she was like mine,” spits Jordan, and Ruth steams.

“You ought to be grateful that you've got a mother. You don't realize how lucky you are. You even had a father ...” Ruth pauses and pulls herself together as she sees the hurt in Jordan's eyes. “Sorry, Jordan,” she says, knowing how much his father had meant to him, but she'd lost her father too—a father she'd never even seen. George Harrison's death had meant more than the end of her dream—it had forever slammed the lid on the possibility that she could prove her heritage.

While growing up fatherless may have been difficult, she was barely fifteen when she had found herself entirely alone. “I've just lost my mother,” she'd tell concerned adults, and they had always jumped to the same conclusion. But Ruth's words were not some carefully parsed euphemism. She really did lose her mother and, despite the fact that it has been more than twenty years since she vanished, her mother's name has never been logged in police records as a missing person. In fact, if fifteen-year-old Ruth had been able to come up with the rent at the end of that month, no one else might have known that her mother simply went out one night and never returned.

“Mom will come back eventually,” the teenager had convinced herself as she hid out in their dingy basement and tried to eat her way to happiness; after all, her mother had always returned before—to let the swellings subside and the bruises heal.

“You're a good girl, Ruthie,” her mother would tell the young girl as she bathed the battle scars. “You're not gonna be like me. You're gonna get an education like your dad.”

But Ruth had already quit school. Handicapped by her size, she was never able to outrun the mob of girls streaming out of the school at the end of the day.
With careful timing she might latch on to a departing teacher, but an ambush usually awaited somewhere on the route.

“My dad's bigger than your dad,” never helped Ruth either.

“You ain't got a dad.”

“I have so.”

“Yeah, he's a fuckin' insect.”

“A Beatle ... He's a Beatle.”

“Well, this is what we do to beetles ...”

By lunchtime, Ruth has abandoned any hope of persuading Jordan to call his mother, and she is in the kitchen when Trina struggles into the busy café with a wheelchair.

“I brought Mr. Jenson ...” Trina calls to Cindy.

“Johnson,” says a thin voice from under a battered panama.

“He gets very befuddled,” whispers Trina, then she questions herself and takes a quick peep under the hat. “Oh, you're right. It is Mr. Johnson. How did that happen?”

“You said you were gonna buy me lunch,” complains the ancient man as Trina explains to Cindy, “He's from the home. I'm always mixing them up. Is Ruth in the kitchen? I've got a book for her.”

“Don't give me nothing to chew,” comes the voice from under the hat. “I didn't bring my teeth.”

“He likes rice pudding,” says Trina as she dumps her charge and heads to the kitchen.

“You can't leave him there,” calls Cindy, but Trina is on a mission. The book, liberated from Marcie's extensive library of unopened digests, is called
“Fight Cancer with Food and Live Forever,”
and Trina figures the sooner Jordan starts, the better.