Roost (5 page)

Initially I can’t comprehend the news
. I say okay as though he’s told me to take out the garbage, and I hang up the phone. I stumble to the table and knock over my glass, which hits the sugar bowl with an audible clink. The kind of sound that should precede a kiss or follow a toast. I think of the island. Its impossible thinness. An eyelash in the sea. Its wild horses, silver-haired bats, and the seals. The seals! Dragged to the bottom of the ocean by Greenland sharks, blind and obtuse and out of nowhere. I think of their descent into the dark. The sudden quiet. Mom flipping through a magazine or righting her blouse or buttering my father’s bread when the blood began to clot and parts of her brain started to die off. Little bits of Janice disappearing like the contents of an advent calendar. Memories and facts snuffed out, cell by cell. Her brain, like the island, made virtually invisible by the darkness of night. Porch lights extinguished, lighthouse dead in the fog. My mother in the aisle, flanked by the plane’s emergency lights, with the seals below and my father above and the ponies roaming aimlessly between. The phone rings again.

“You hung up,” Dan says.

I try to stand but lose my footing and fall to my knees. Wes’s Transformer lies face down in the puddle of wine on the table.

“I know,” I reply.

“She’s gone,” he says, and it sounds less permanent this way. Like she might be gone to get milk or an oil change.

“I know.”

“And she’s not coming back.” He breaks down and sobs. Noises tumble out of his mouth like vomit. Breath all chopped up, chest in a blender.

“Where are you?” I ask. My house is so quiet.

“Yarmouth,” he whispers.

“Where’s Mom?”

“Hospital,” he says, passing off the phone. The exchange is messy.

I wait for my dad.

“Dad?” I ask. “Are you there, Dad?”

“Claudia … she just … she was just going to stretch her legs.”

I wipe my eyes with the heels of my hands.

“They put her in the basement. She’s in the basement over there. They shouldn’t put them in the basement. Basements are cold. She doesn’t have her slippers.”

I take the phone away from my ear and sob like my brother. Dan whispers from my lap they will call tomorrow. I hang up and toss the phone on the counter. It spins and comes to a stop beside the knife block.

“Are you looking for something, Mommy?” Wes wanders down the hall towards the kitchen.

“Your Transformer,” I say.

“It’s on the table,” he says. “Beside you.”

“Right,” I reply, pulling myself up. I pick up Optimus Prime.

“Yuck,” Wes says. “Why is he all wet? He smells like the place we take the recycling to.”

“He went swimming,” I explain.

I towel-dry the transformer and carry Wes back to bed.

“You okay, Mommy?”

I nod and pull the covers up to his chin. He has Glen’s chin, pointed with a slight depression. I stroke it with my fingertip.

“Will you sing?”

“Sing what?” I ask.

“Anything.”

I can’t think of anything to sing. I try to remember what my mom sang to me but I can only think of Rita MacNeil and the Men of the Deeps and the jingle from Sleep Country that makes me want to knife my mattress. My mother could not sing. She had no range and made up lyrics. Replaced entire phrases with humming. Wes waits for it to begin. I take a deep breath and make up a song about the transformer.

“You used to be an ambulance …”

Wes is unsure about this song. He turns onto his side and closes his eyes. I back out of the room, making up lyrics, inventing a chorus that has Optimus Prime wishing for his legs. I feel heady and nauseous and slump back down at the kitchen table, which is still sticky from the wine. Mom needs her slippers. I can go to her house and get them and drive them to her. Yarmouth is only three hours away. Four hours? Three and a half? How do I get to Yarmouth? Is it the 102 or the 103? I will put the kids in the car and drive south and bring Mom her slippers. I slide on my Toms, look in the fridge for my keys. A cantaloupe rolls out, which I kick.
Fuck you
. I go to my laptop and google hospitals in Yarmouth.
Yarmouth Regional. Providing care to 64,000 people in Shelburne, Yarmouth, and Digby Counties
. Care? Is that what they call it? Putting mommies in the basement without their slippers? Maybe I could take her a sleeping bag. There should be one in the linen closet. A double one from when Glen and I went camping. I tear the closet apart until I’m surrounded by a heap
of towels, most of them pilled, all of them old. And piles of sheets. Fitted ones all bunched up like beehives. Pillowcases I never iron. On my tiptoes I pull on the top shelf, straining to see, it creaks with my weight. There’s the sleeping bag in the back, and I yank it by the cord of its polyester sheath. It tumbles on top of me, like a fabric sausage. I pull until it’s completely free from its shell: navy plaid, unwashed, smelling like wood smoke. I climb inside.

I wear sunglasses at breakfast
. We eat Corn Flakes. I don’t tell them about Grandma. I find a note from Turtle Grove in Joan’s backpack saying she needs more diapers. I search the house and manage to scrounge up four. It is an ordinary day. On the way to daycare we pass the same woman walking to work that we always do. Her gait and headband are the same. We get the red light by the high school. Wesley talks the entire way. Of zombies and Japan and the corn twists he never gets in his lunch. I want to tell him to shut up. I want to scream it.

I park by the door and walk them inside. The daycare director approaches.

“How’s your mom?” she says in a voice that’s just above a whisper.

I shake my head. She covers her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” she says touching my arm.

“I haven’t told the kids yet.”

“If you need anything, please don’t hesitate —”

“I could only find four diapers,” I interrupt.

She waves me off and says, “Don’t worry about the diapers.”

I call work from the car and share the news. Stroke on a plane. No slippers in the morgue.

Then I drive by my parents’ house where the swing is still broken and the trees have lost all their leaves. The house looks different this morning. Locked up and less an owner. Quiet and weary after decades of dirty hands and grass clippings and
Christmas lights. A package juts out of the mailbox. I park and walk up the driveway, stepping over the cracks in the asphalt as I have since childhood, and I pick up the mail. Along with a package addressed to my father is a coupon for ten percent off furnace cleaning. Will she be cremated? I toss both the flyer and the package in the front passenger seat and drive home.

When
The View
comes on, I cry because Elisabeth’s a Republican and Barbara pretends she’s not an octogenarian. She thinks she’s fifty like a dog thinks it’s human. When Glen calls, I explain this to him, between spoonfuls of my second bowl of Corn Flakes.

“Why are you home?” he asks.

“My mother died last night. On the plane.”

“On the plane?”

“They were coming home from Cuba.”

“I thought you said she was okay?”

“She was okay! She had a stroke.”

“Because she hit her head?”

“I don’t know Glen, I’m not a friggin’ doctor. I just know she had a stroke. On the plane. Were you calling for something specific?”

“No, I was just going to leave a message. I think I left my sunglasses there. I’m coming over.”

We hang up and I yell at Barbara, “You’re fucking eighty!”

Glen shows up with apple turnovers from Costco and Kleenex with the built-in lotion.

“I brought you some ginger ale,” he says, twisting off the cap.

“I’m not sick, Glen.”

“I know but I didn’t know what else to get.”

He hands me the bottle and parks himself on the coffee table. “I’m sorry, Claud.”

He paces around the room when my father calls. Dad’s thoughts are all over the place.

“Your mom loved carnations. The price of gas went up overnight. Dan has never eaten a hard-boiled egg.”

I respond with like comments: “Joan wants to be a cat squirrel for Halloween. I think Mom would want a white casket. One of those glossy ones like the cabinets you see in the show homes. There are forty grams of fat in a carrot muffin.”

Glen gives me an odd look and turns off
The View
. Dad asks what a cat squirrel is and explains that Mom wanted Stompin’ Tom Connors played at her funeral.

“What song?” I am only able to recall the Hockey Song and the
PEI
tourism jingle. Dad does not reply. I hear him ask Dan where his glasses are. Glen holds up a turnover. I nod and he puts one on a plate.

“Thanks,” I tell him.

“What was that, dear?” Dad asks.

“Nothing. Listen, how are you getting home?”

“Your brother’s renting a car.”

“Are you sure Dan should be driving? I mean … this soon?”

“We’re not leaving until tomorrow. We have to make arrangements to have your mother moved first.”

“Call me before you leave. Okay? I love you, Dad.”

I pick at the turnover.

“How is he?” Glen asks, taking a second turnover from the plastic tray.

“I don’t think he’s slept.”

Minutes go by. I stare at the ceiling and start humming the Hockey Song. All I know is the chorus. After a few times Glen begins whistling along.

“She wants Stompin’ Tom played at her funeral.”

Glen collects
LEGO
from the carpet. “That’s right,” Glen says, waving his finger. “I remember her telling me that once.”

“My mom discussed her funeral with you?”

“No, no. Just that she liked him. What song are you going to play?”

“No idea. Dad didn’t know. What other songs are there?”

“‘The Sasquatch Song,’ ‘The Snowmobile Song,’ ‘Margo’s Cargo’ …”

I glare at him.

“What?” he says defensively. “I don’t know. Go look them up.”

I take my laptop out of the bag along with a pink cup and saucer and a fake egg. It is a habit of Joan’s to stow away parts of her tea set so in the event of a natural disaster we can still have a tea party. I google Stompin’ Tom and get a website with his discography. There are hundreds of songs. I scroll down the track lists for something appropriately titled for a funeral.

“Ever hear of ‘I Am the Wind?’”

“How does it go?” Glen asks from the bathroom.

“I don’t know.”

“What else is there?”

“‘Just a Blue Moon Away’?”

“Nope. Never heard of it.

I keep scrolling and find one called “Rubberhead” and I start laughing because of the irony and it’s absolutely not funny, and because of this I laugh more. My stomach throbs and I cover my face with an afghan. It smells like yogurt, but I keep my face under there because I am completely ashamed and still laughing. When I come up for air, Glen’s emerging from the bathroom and it looks like he has toothpaste on his chin and I am suspicious he’s used my toothbrush.

He touches my shoulder and says, “It’s going to be okay.” I pull the afghan away. The smell is unbearable and I’ve gained control and I wipe at my eyes, but when I think about the song I start laughing again.

“Are you …
laughing?
” Glen says, walking around to the front of the couch.

I shake my head. I fall into the arm of the couch and the laughter turns into crying because only evil people would find “Rubberhead” amusing under the circumstances. Glen takes the laptop and sets it on the coffee table. He pulls me by the arm up to a sitting position, continues scrolling down the screen, and there, second-last track from the bottom, he finds “Sable Island.”

“That will work,” I say.

After supper I take the kids to Dairy Queen
. They both order Dilly Bars. I choke down a cheeseburger in three bites. We sit in the parking lot across from a couple in a car with two doors, who smoke out their windows, flicking ashes into the wind. Our car smells like pickles. I turn off the engine and tell the kids about their grandmother. The chocolate around Joan’s mouth looks like facial hair, but my attempts to clean it off are futile from the front seat.

“How’d she die?” Wesley asks. His eyebrows furl like his father’s when he is contemplating something.

“She had something called a stroke.”

“Because she got hit by the boat?”

“Sort of,” I say, still unsure whether the events are connected.

“Where is she?”

“She’s in heaven,” I explain.

Joan asks, “With Jesus?”

“Yes, with Jesus,” I reply, turning in my seat to face her. It hurts my neck.

“Who else is there?” Wesley wants to know.

“Lots of people, I suppose.”

“He like Dilly Bars?”

“Does who like Dilly Bars, Joan?”

“Jesus.”

I remove a peanut from my sundae and crunch into it. “I’m sure Jesus likes Dilly Bars.”

Joan breaks her Dilly Bar stick in half.

“Is Grandpa going to go to heaven too?” Wes asks.

“Someday.”

“But they go everywhere together.” He leans his head against the window and points to an inflatable pumpkin on top of a car dealership. “We don’t have a pumpkin,” he says. His eyes fill with tears.

“You’re right.” Halloween is tomorrow or next week. Is it today? “Let’s go get one right now.”

We drive across the parking lot to the grocery store. I check my iPhone. Right, it’s the 24th of October. Mom has only been dead for one day. The kids have no costumes, but we don’t need to panic about a pumpkin quite yet.

“What do you want to be for Halloween?” I ask Wes, unbuckling him from his car seat.

“I want to be …” he pauses and places his finger on his chin. “A pirate!”

“What about me?” Joan chimes.

“You already told me you wanted to be a cat squirrel.”

“No,” she argues.

“Well what then?”

“Me want to be a stroke.”

By the next day
, I’m carving pumpkins and cutting costume pieces out of discount fabrics. The kitchen table is taken over by seeds and pipe cleaners and scraps of felt. I’m constantly moving needles and sharp things to the centre of the table where Joan is less likely to get at them. Scattered in between our decorations are notes on the funeral. Times and dates and estimates on everything from catering to caskets. There are lists of psalms and sheet music. “Sable Island” does not make the cut.

Dan calls. “What if we framed some of her favourite recipes and displayed them at the visitation Friday?”

“What?”

“They were sort of her claim to fame.”

“Yeah, but you don’t do that.”

“Why not? I think she’d like it.”

“No.” I take a sewing needle from the wine glass and scrape my teeth.

“Her pecan and goat cheese salad, beef stroganoff, and blueberry grunt. I already had Allison-Jean print them off on cardstock.”

“That’s great, Dan. Is she printing off a wine list too?”

“And what if we had one of her former students give a eulogy?”

“The funeral’s in four days.”

“It would be just a few words about Mom as a teacher.”

“She taught grade two.” I poke my gums until they start to bleed.

“So? They’d be grown-up now. It could be nice.”

“Are you nuts? Have you ever been to a funeral?”

“I’m just trying to make it special!”

“A recipe for blueberry crisp and some former student’s memory of how she taught them to spell ‘cat’ does not make it special.”

“Blueberry grunt.”

“No!”

“You’re being difficult.”

“You’re being ridiculous!”

He sniffs into the phone like he might be crying. I sigh. “You should be the one doing the eulogy. I’ll pick her dress and make sure her makeup looks okay. All she’d really care about is that no one fights and she’s wearing pantyhose. Okay?”

“And the recipes.”

“If it’s that important to you, display the recipes. And,”
fuck
, “do you think Allison-Jean could make Joan a cat squirrel costume?”

“A what?”

I give the phone to Joan to tell Allison-Jean what a cat squirrel is.

After the kids are both in bed, I pour a glass of wine and start one of the tasks I’ve been putting off: sorting through photos. I dump out a Ziploc bag marked vacation.

They’re not vacation photos, though. They date back to when we were in junior high. When I had a perm and Dan still had a weight problem. In one of them he has a black eye. Darrell Wilson kicked the shit out of him because Dan was fat and was in his way. Darrell Wilson who smoked rolled cigarettes and wore jean jackets and had sex with Miranda
Coughlin, who worked at Tim Horton’s, when he was twelve. Sex with someone who had a job! Darrell Wilson with his cauliflower ear who was probably abused and didn’t have his sheets cleaned regularly and ate dinner at a card table. Dan staggering, blubbering, bruising, white flesh hanging. His textbooks scattered over the parking lot. And I hollered after Darrell Wilson, “You have a grandpa for a Dad!” Dan lost weight after that.

There’s another bag, helpfully Sharpied Photos. It’s full of pictures of my parents, and it is as Wesley said: they went everywhere together. My mother, wearing the same white sneakers over a ten-year period, with my father, his arm around her shoulders, their hips touching, but just barely. She wears walking shorts and sleeveless blouses. On the boardwalk, in a city, on a trip I don’t remember them taking. On the ferry to
PEI
and perched on the picnic table in Dan’s backyard. The pictures from winter are older. She is thinner and wears a full-length coat with a fur collar. Same pose, but Dad carries a snowball in his hand and his cowlick looks more severe. Always together. What will he do without her?