The Hour of Bad Decisions (19 page)

Sitting in the hospital next to my father, I tried to count backwards through the days, to see how it could be possible that I hadn't seen him for more than a month. He was flat on his back, still not talking, an iv in his arm, the whole arm tied down to keep him from thrashing the needle out. I tried to imagine how it was that I could have been absent for enough time for this Terry to turn up and settle in.

At first, the math didn't add up. I thought I must have seen him about three weeks before, because on the first Wednesday of every month I bring over Chinese food. Then, before we start eating, he always tells me that it's not real Chinese food at all, that he had been at conferences in Beijing – he still calls it Peking – where you'd go and look at a bright red, plucked smoked duck hanging in the restaurant window, and a few minutes later, it would be out of the window and onto your plate.

But then I remembered that I'd had to cancel the last Chinese meal, that I'd been at work late and hadn't
wanted to punch in another two hours of not measuring up with Dad. After that, I tried to piece together when it would have been that I'd seen him last, but finding the exact day was like those little floaters you get in your eyes sometimes – try to look straight at one, and it just flitters away. Your only chance to catch it is somewhere in your peripheral vision, looking at it while at the same time pretending to ignore it completely.

To be honest, maybe it had been a month and a half. Maybe, on the absolute outside, two months since I had last been over – but I had called more recently than that, I was sure.

Day by day, I was still collecting Terry's mail. No one had shown up to get it. No Terry, no one calling on his behalf – or, at least, no one that anyone in the building had thought to tell me about. Letters, the occasional bill, once or twice a cheque for something else he'd stolen. Once, a bank statement: little by little, I felt like I was getting a sense of the man, just by the pieces of paper that were trailing after him.

Back at the hospital, they'd look at Dad and say “at least he's breathing on his own.” They used to tell me that three or four times a day, as if breathing carried its own kind of Olympic medal. There were others on his floor, on Four-North, on respirators, but Dad wasn't – and I was beginning to wonder just how bad he actually was. Every now and then I'd look at him and think I'd caught him pretending, staring back at me as sharp as a weasel. And then the moment would be gone.

It was hard not to reach out and pinch him. Hard not to say “Wake up. You're wasting my time here. There are things I'm supposed to be doing.”

Once, sitting on that plastic chair, I'd even tried talking to him. At least he wasn't interrupting.

“I do my best, Dad. There's a lot that has to get done, and there's just me – I can't be here at your beck and call all the time.”

Nothing – just breathing.

Before, he'd always been at me because I didn't visit enough. Always at me, and I never had the answers he was looking for: there's no way to explain where you have to be, when the only place you have to be is work. It's like you're speaking some kind of foreign language, as if your consonants and vowels have gotten themselves all mixed up, and you're spouting some kind of weird, incomprehensible job-based glossalalia.

But things were getting by me at the office – the work still had to be done, e-mails sent, evaluations done, and I was sitting next to someone who used to be my father, and showed no signs that he was anything of the kind any more.

Days passed, and still he couldn't talk. But even if he could, I got the idea that my father wouldn't be telling me anything about Traves.

Loyalties shift quickly – and old people are so damned stubborn.

Then one morning, as I got to the hospital with yet another handful of Terry Traves' mail, I met Sergeant Parsons leaving my father's room. He had a
coil notebook in his hands, and he was flipping the cover shut, shaking his head.

“Still nothing?” I asked, trying to keep the opened mail out of Parsons' sight.

“No,” he said. “No charges. Your father says Terry was working for him, that he gave him anything that's gone from the apartment as pay.”

“Bullshit,” I said. It just came out – I don't talk like that, but it was out of my mouth all by itself. The world felt suddenly tilted.

“Sorry,” said Parsons. “That's what your father says.”

“But he can't talk.”

“Yes, he can,” Parsons said. “To the doctors, since yesterday. To me, just now.”

And the still-rumpled Sergeant Parsons stuffed his notebook into his jacket pocket and walked away down the hall, following the red stripe in the linoleum that led to the exit. I thought of that line as being coloured guilty red. Every night as I rushed away.

I pushed into my father's room, and I'll admit I was probably more angry than I had a right to be. I certainly said more than I should have.

“Who the hell is Terry Traves?” I yelled at him, throwing the handful of mail onto the bed. “He's not your son. He's not anything. He's just some con-artist who preys on the feeble-minded. Feeble-minded like you, Dad. I had the home care in to keep you safe from people like him.

“I put the locks on, and it did no damned good. You just let him right in.”

My father didn't speak. I still hadn't seen even a sign that he could talk, that he could even move. They had him trussed right in with the sheets, pulled up high on his shoulders. He looked at me for a moment, and it seemed like his eyes were as black as night glass.

“You bought locks. You did the best you could?” he whispered, the words ragged and unsteady, as if his mouth was full of dust. “You bought the locks, and paid someone to come and put them on. Like everything else.” And then his eyes swivelled away from me, up to the line where the ceiling met the wall, as if there was something more important there than anything else in the world. But there were also tears on his cheeks.

“I would have done it for you,” he said quietly.

He wouldn't speak to me again, even though I sat there for the next three hours, until I thought from his breathing he must be asleep.

He looked impossibly frail then, even more fragile than he had in the emergency room, because suddenly, it was obvious he was still in there. Hiding behind that sunken face was the same person he'd always been.

When I got up from the chair next to his bed, I realized that Terry Traves' mail was strewn all over the bed.

And Stephen was finally coming, probably still smelling of birds, and I would have to hire someone to clean up the condo and get rid of all the crap that Traves had left behind. I'd have to get the locksmith
in. Stephen would sit with Dad and jolly him along, and I'd be left racing all over the city looking for new home care – either that or a home where they could really keep an eye on Dad, whether he liked it or not. It would just go on and on. Then Stephen would up and leave again, and I'd be the helpless dope who even wound up booking his airport taxi.

And after that, I knew I'd still be out there all by myself, looking everywhere for a small man wearing eally big shoes.

S
HE HAD TURNED THE PAPER TOWEL ROLL
around again, so that the sheet of paper came off the front of the roll, instead of the back. He knew immediately what that meant.

It was the same with the toilet paper in the bathroom – sometimes, for weeks even, it didn't matter which way it unrolled, and then suddenly it did. Leo looked around the bathroom: the towels were hanging with their edges turned under, and the toothbrushes were lined up in straight lines like a bride and groom waiting at the altar.

Not the toothbrushes, he thought.

There was wind outside, but the storm was still far away and building, an old man muttering about ancient, unforgotten slights. Gusty, slapping wind, but the early morning light was all sunshine.

Leo pulled back the curtains and let the light stream into their bedroom. Then he checked the
closet. She must have been quiet at first, he decided. The sound of the hangers hadn't woken him, but all the shirts were now together at one end of the closet, pants at the other. The shirts were facing the same direction, too, their buttons all done up and facing west. On the floor, the shoes were standing at attention in mute parade, toes lined up square.

It was worse than he had thought.

The trick, Leo knew, was not to respond with bewilderment, not to curl up or hide, because that wouldn't do anything. Ignoring it was only postponing the inevitable. The trick was to do it right this time. To just do it right: to learn from past mistakes, to catch her while she was still falling, before she hit the ground hard.

Atlantic storms roll in fast, the first warning a thin petticoat of high, light cloud that spreads across the sky, unstoppable. One moment, there is that thin sunlight – that white, bright hard sunlight through a scrim of high cloud – and the next, the long green robes of the spruce trees have gone dark with frightened anticipation. Storms jump at you quickly, ripping the tops off the waves and throwing them in your face as salty spume.

The rain slashes down cold, almost horizontal, drenching you in an instant: the trees, large and small, sweep around together, branches moving as one, showing the wind direction like fast brushstrokes on loose canvas. Storms can be unexpected and dangerous, blasting you with snow and hail where moments before you had been revelling in the simple visceral
pleasures of spring, and you have to take cover the best way you can. Sometimes the storms end quickly: other times, they seem to stall somehow, hung up on the shore and feeding on themselves.

She was somewhere downstairs, probably violently cleaning by now. He knew he would hear her if she was still upstairs.

It was a big house, two fat square storeys of dark green with white trim, large enough that two people could live at the tops of their voices and not disturb each other. Leo and Helen had bought the place for reasons that some of their friends found completely incomprehensible: the small coal fireplaces, the formal way the plaster was patterned around the ceiling fixtures, the banister that curved to the left, going up.

It was one of a line of St. John's rowhouses huddled on a narrow street. They had moved in six months before, throwing themselves into making the place their own, patching up the wreckage of their former lives as they patched plaster and poured paint into roller trays to cover up past mistakes. Past mistakes – they both had their own personal debris trails, memories blown apart and thrown willy-nilly on the ground by cyclones that had hit before they knew each other.

He knew she loved him wildly – knew it, without a moment of doubt. Lying in the bathtub, the hot water cooling around him, he would hear her singing in another room, and know that she was singing just about the idea of him.

She had picked up the pieces of his broken life, and had put them back together when he thought
the very idea was a lost cause, swept the bits up and gently fit them back into a workable whole. She had taken such fine, delicate care that he had barely felt the touch of her fingertips – she had held him loose in her arms, knowing that she couldn't hold tight, and had told him he would one day be all right. And she'd been right. To him, she had a breathless magic that came with the rest, a bright brilliant light that was also accompanied by dark.

There was no way to tell when she had gone downstairs that morning. He already knew exactly what it would be like: guaranteed, she would be talking loudly – talking to no one.

Helen talked to herself almost constantly when she was alone, but Leo knew by now that there was a tone to listen for.

Down the stairs, walking alongside the high, white walls, trailing a fingernail along the plaster for balance: he was heading for the sound. That's what he always did, although, even before he got there, he felt a small flutter of fear in his chest, so familiar that it was almost expected. Still, he kept walking.

Then, he knew.

She was smashing dishes in the kitchen – at least, that's how he thought of it. Taking mugs out of the dish rack, banging them hard enough on the counter that he didn't see how, occasionally, a weak one didn't just surrender and fly apart into shards. Her back to him, she started stacking plates – smacking them together – while he watched. Making them pay for someone else's sins, he thought. He had never lived
with anyone for whom so many things exploded – drinking glasses sometimes seemed to surrender and shatter, unable to contain the internal stresses of their form. Dishes broke, pictures fell. He had the feeling that anything breakable was just waiting, poised.

It was five o'clock in the morning, and she was already fully dressed for work – showered, her hair done, makeup on, dressed for an office that was still hours away. Outside, through the long kitchen windows, it was the kind of morning light that makes it seem as if the dawn is trying to make up its mind about breaking. The cloud thickening now, dense and solid, losing the delicate patterning it had when the cloud had been thinner. The big maples in the back yard were still black in shadow, leaning in like neigh-bours listening at the windows. Leaves starting to dance side to side in the freshening wind.

She was talking in one long angry sentence, and he knew it could be addressed to anyone: “If I told you something like that, you'd look at me and tell me I was an idiot so it's fair enough that I should call you an idiot, especially since I'm already doing all your work and you're always taking the credit anyway…”

Her voice had a low, angry undertone, a flatness, a sound that carried its own implied warning.

“Sometimes,” Helen had told him once, “someone will pass me on the street on a bike while I'm walking and I'll realize I'm talking out loud, because they'll look back at me like I'm a crazy woman.”