The Last Woman (24 page)

A
t times, he is dizzy, and at night he is often woken by the twitching and churning of his legs as they pedal in the blankets in their futile attempts to carry him out of the quagmires and threats of his dreams. Plastic tubes burrow their needles into his arms, held by patches of clear, bloodstained tape, and down the tubes creep the liquids that hang in plastic bags by his bed, which he is convinced are making him weaker. He is in the Black Falls hospital – this fact keeps registering with the dull pulse of a labouring engine, for there, out his tinted window, the murk of the city spreads toward the citadel of the paper mill, toward the titanium glint of the Old Woman River. Each time he opens his eyes, he searches for the river; but even its sight
does nothing to still the nauseating sense of placelessness, of being adrift beyond the borders of his own body.

His day nurse, Carmine, bustles in, the treads of her runners squeaking on the polished tiles. She speaks as if to a child not bright enough to understand. “How we doin’ now? Would you like me to fix your pillows?”

He accepts her ministrations with indifference. A sense of exhausted aftermath has enclosed him, as if he has survived some great blast and now must lie with ringing senses. He had been looking at the clear-cuts; and then – the time between annihilated – he was sitting at a table in the Rendezvous. Around him, as always, the golden cylinders rose and fell, while on a stage no bigger than the roof of a semi, a woman in buckskin breathed some hard-luck song over the steel phallus held delicately between her fingertips. And then: the world slowly capsizing, and the jostling in the parking lot – the cool darkness of the parking lot filled with the moon-scrubbed roofs of cars – and a hard hat careening hollowly on the asphalt. The first blow came like a soft push against the side of his head – hardly any pain at all – and then he was curled on his side feeling the toes of their boots drumming into his back, his head, while he went far inside himself searching for the deep hinterlands where he might wait out their attack.
Hey, Injun, you like that? That’ll teach you to talk back. Want another one? Hey, warrior!
And somewhere in there, in the far redoubt of himself, he had curled around a singular and shameful knowledge, which was the core of his resistance and of his shame: a kind of dance – manic, perversely
joyful, triumphant. In some way, he
had
liked that. For a little while he had found a punishment equal to what he had seen – capable for a little while of obliterating it – though at the same time, it seemed to flow from the same place. Whatever power had felled the trees had felled him.

Then, later: hitchhiking back to the Harbour, finding his boat, driving off in a fog of pain, slipping in and out of coherence: there was something wrong with his head. His memory of the facts – the clear-cut, the Rendezvous, the hard hat spinning through the parking lot – cannot explain the total dislocation of the world. Everything is in pieces now, each existing on its own little island of time. He sees his tube-pierced hand lying on the sheet beside him. Then he discovers it in the air, waving vaguely, and does not know how it got from one point to the other. By old instinct, he had driven the boat to Inverness. He needed their help.

People come and go. The slabs of darkness and of light come and go, and though the darkness is not really dark (the glow of the night light) and the light is not really daylight (the tinted window), he feels he is being carried through these repetitions without choice. Everything now happens without choice: his day nurse; his night nurse; the orderly in blue who takes him shuffling with his portable bag to the bathroom; the doctor who writes on his clipboard without looking at him; the minister who tells the joke about the Irishman and then stands praying in a voice trembling and insincere; the groaning from behind the curtain where a man he has seen only once – a pinched
snout hooked by the transparent line of an oxygen tube – performs the relentless ceremony of breathing.

Yvonne sits in the reddish-brown armchair under the window. She, too, has come and gone. She has told him that on Sunday morning (what Sunday, what morning?), they found him passed out in his boat, among the new shoals at the mouth of Pine Island bay.

“Ann Scott called. I guess she’d been worried, been trying to get hold of us. When I told her what happened, she said you were at their place – it must have been the night before we found you.”

He turns his head away on the pillow, away from her prodding. He has not told her anything about that night, or about the clear-cuts; he has not even told her what happened to him in the parking lot, though about that part she has guessed.
Were you in a fight?
Her old refrain, repeated throughout his boyhood.
What – another one?

“Can you remember what happened after you left the Scotts?”

“I remember enough,” he says. “Did you tell her I was here?”

His sister nods. “I told her they were keeping you for a few days. She says she’s coming over.”

“What good will that do?” he says and struggles to his elbows.

“You lie there. They have to make sure you don’t have brain damage. You don’t want to end up like Knobby Carriere with a plate in your head.” Yvonne goes on talking, her mouth moving so that he can see the gap in
her teeth where Nelson Longbranch hit her many years before. He is no longer listening to her. His mind is being carried sideways into a place where even the thought of Ann Scott disappears, like a stick dragged under by a current. “What I don’t understand is if you were injured when you got to the Scotts’, why they didn’t
do
something.”

“Do what,” he says.

Sometime later – the same day? the next? – he wakes and Ann is there. She is sitting in the chair, absorbed in a small book. He watches her turn the brightly coloured pages.

“There you are,” she says, looking up, as if she has been searching for him.

Raising his hand, he gives a little wave.

For some moments they go on looking at each other, but he can only bear it for so long. There is something shameful about being found here, with his piss hanging in a bag by his bed, in a backless gown. He gestures at her book.

“Matisse,” she says.

Perching on the edge of the bed, she turns the pages. A scarlet carpet. A blue room. Four oranges in a turquoise cabinet. The colours are too much; and anyway he cannot concentrate on the pictures with her so close, her arm brushing his shoulder. He would like to touch her, there, on the back of her hand. She turns another page. Five naked figures, their skin an orangey colour, sit or stand on a green hillside, against a blue sky. Some are playing flutes, the rest singing with open mouths. The figures are simple, as if drawn by a child, yet he cannot stop looking at them. Above him, Ann’s voice goes on, stops, goes on.
She is talking about the painting. Just let him lie here, with his eyes closed, her arm pressed against his shoulder, not listening now to her words but to her voice. Some time later, he opens his eyes and her voice is still going on, but no longer about the pictures, he realizes. Now she is saying, “You think you know someone. You know him pretty well. I mean, you’ve lived with him for almost fifteen years. But you don’t know him, not really: you don’t know what he’s like. Maybe he doesn’t know himself. You think he’s solid in such and such a way.
He
thinks he is – but what is solid?”

He knows that what she is saying is terribly important to her; it should be important to him. But he keeps drifting off.

A little later, she says she has to leave. She has to pick up Rowan. But she doesn’t move.

Then all at once she bends to him. Her damp cheek slides past his. “Love you,” she whispers. Over her shoulder, at the foot of the bed, his nurse is shaking her thermometer.

A
nn and Rowan drive through Black Falls in her Honda.

“Why are we going home this way?”

“Thought we might like a change,” she says mildly.

“It’s longer,” Rowan says critically. He is flushed after his scrimmage and cradling a bottle of water that despite her urging he is refusing to drink. Normally their best times are in the car, the two of them talking easily, but today he is stubbornly uncommunicative.

And the hospital is already on top of them: her hands weak on the wheel. A vast grid of windows – which is his? – a flock of pigeons beating out, and they are past.

At home, as she makes supper, the current of her thoughts keeps tugging her away from the rounds of meat,
the slivers of potato.
Fuck
, she says, as her knife slips and a berry of blood swells on her finger. Sucking at the cut, she goes into the bathroom. As she rummages in the medicine cabinet for the bandages, boxes and tubes tumble out. “Just stop right now,” she tells herself, gripping the edge of the sink. “It’s madness and you know it.”

At seven, Richard calls to say he’ll be another hour. She feeds Rowan, who soon runs off outside – too soon for her, for she feels a need to keep him close this evening. Upstairs, she goes to the bedroom closet and decides to change into a dress. Back in the kitchen, she pours herself some wine. When Richard finally arrives, she greets him warmly, but he is weary and dismissive, as he has been all week. It is past eight-thirty by the time they sit down to their meal. His dishevelled hair, falling over his forehead, trembles a little as he cuts his steak.

“I saw a bit of Rowan’s scrimmage today,” she says, trying once more to connect. “He seems to be doing well.”

“Good,” Richard says, not looking at her.

“One of the other parents – that big fellow with the cane – he said Rowan had good hands. Soft hands. I wasn’t sure what he meant.”

Richard brings another piece of meat to his mouth. Ever since the Benoits left, she has felt this remoteness in him, this hard air of disapproval. Does he blame her for the foreshortened weekend with the Benoits? Is he still grinding an axe over Billy, as if it’s her fault that he showed up that night? “Richard, please,
tell
me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing. I told you.”

They go on eating in silence. A pall descends, and her sense of danger deepens. “For God’s sake, Richard, we can’t keep doing this!”

Picking up his wineglass, he takes a sip, sets it down, and goes back to his steak. Her anger is boiling up now, and for several seconds it leaves her speechless. “Billy’s in the hospital,” she says suddenly. She
will
make him talk. “I called Yvonne the day after we got back. That night he came to us, he
had
been in a fight. Yvonne said he didn’t make it home after he left Inverness. They found him the next morning in his boat. He’d blacked out, run up onto a reef. They’re watching him. Doing tests.”

Briefly Richard’s blue eyes, hollowed with fatigue, find hers. “And you went to see him.”

“Why wouldn’t I go to see him?”

“Well, if you have to ask –”

“I
am
asking! Tell me, Richard. I really want to know.” He is shaking his head. “Stop patronizing me.”

“Well,” he says, speaking with exaggerated gravity. “He came to my house and insulted my guest. He undermined a critical situation.
Critical
, Ann. I don’t know why you persist with this. I’m sorry for his troubles, but the man is no friend to us. I don’t trust him. In fact –” Richard puts down his fork, frowning as he considers his words. “I don’t want you to see him again.”

“I really don’t think you can tell me that.”

He is silent.

“My God.” Pivoting on her chair, Ann sits, grinning in disbelief. A moment later she picks up her plate and, hands trembling, carries it out to the kitchen.

That night, unable to sleep, she goes down the hall to the studio they built in the new addition. All week, since they’ve returned to Black Falls, she has tried, without much success, to work here: sketching the view from the balcony, trying her hand at a watercolour. Going directly to a shelf, she pulls down the artist’s sketchbook where, a few years ago, at her therapist’s suggestion, she had begun to write down her thoughts, her dreams.

Leafing through the journal, she pauses to read lines and passages at random.

No ideas, no feeling. Why do I try? Am I trying to please somebody else? I think sometimes of my father. He’s usually enthusiastic about my work, though I don’t think he gets it at all. “How did it go today? Any breakthroughs?” Already moving on to something else… Yet it matters terribly to me what he thinks – even more than Richard. If Dad frowns at a painting, my heart sinks – and can stay sunk for days
.