The Wreckage (32 page)

Billy-Peter stopped in around ten and made himself at home at the kitchen table with a coffee. Since Deen passed on, Billy-Peter came up to Calvert for a regular visit. Drove in on Thursdays to put on a pot of stew or cook up a French fry of potato and bologna while Wish was visiting Lilly at St. Pat’s. The two men sitting with plates on their laps in the evening, watching some ball game or old movie pulled in by the satellite dish that Billy-Peter’s oldest boy had wangled up on the roof.

“What’s news?” Billy-Peter asked, lifting the cup to his mouth. He wore a blue baseball cap high on his head, as if there was a raft of cotton batting stuffed between the hat and his hair.

Wish said, “I woke up with a hard-on this morning,” and Billy-Peter spit a mouthful of coffee up his nose. “I know,” Wish said, incredulous.

Billy-Peter wiped at his mouth. “Signs and wonders,” he said, “before the end of time.”

Wish laughed along with him. But he couldn’t help feeling there was something vaguely and ludicrously apocalyptic about it. A resurrection so unexpected, so inexplicable, it was bound to carry some significance beyond the simple physical fact of itself. He was still mulling it over while he took Lilly down to the common room after
Wheel of Fortune
. Someone was spelunking old hymns and show tunes on the piano as he set her up at a table near the window and Lilly hummed along tunelessly to them. He brought a deck of cards and the plastic crib board that he kept in her room and dealt them a hand. Maybe he was losing his mind as well, he thought, maybe he was spending too much time in the company of madness.

Lilly was able to lift the cards off the table and hold them but Wish had to point to them one at a time to know which she wanted put in the kitty and which to lay down as they played a hand. Her aptitude for the game surprised him. There were days she didn’t know where she was, couldn’t call up Wish’s name, but the simple arithmetic of the cards, the rules and patterns of the game never left her. He counted out her points on the board, moving the matchsticks they used as pegs to keep score. He played to lose and most often did.
“Laurus,”
Lilly announced after every win, clapping the heels of her palms together. Wish held his head in mock despair, repeating
“Fundo, fundo, fundo,”
under his breath. Defeat, defeat, defeat.

When he’d arrived home in Newfoundland and spoken to the doctor assigned to Lilly’s file at the Waterford, he was told she’d been dressing up in an approximation of the vestments of a priest, some stolen from the church, others improvised from her own clothes. Wandered through Renews offering the sacrament to gulls and dogs, performing Latin exorcisms on sheep and rocks and the rusted-out remains of a washer someone had dumped on the side of the road. There was just the hint of a smile on the doctor’s face.

“You finds this hilarious, do you?” Wish said.

The doctor shrugged. He had a slight foreign accent, something eastern European. “It is a rather harmless delusion,” he said. “Much less distressing than her previous episodes. And she has stabilized. There’s no reason she couldn’t be discharged.”

“Well what is she doing here, then?”

“She has nowhere to go, Mr. Furey. The convent in Renews has been closed. We have nowhere to send her.”

He bought an abandoned house in Calvert, between St. John’s and Renews, for the cost of a second-hand car. He bought a second-hand car besides, shuttling into St. John’s from the Southern Shore twice a week to visit Lilly and make arrangements to get her into a home. For the better part of a decade afterwards he made a weekly pilgrimage into St. Pat’s to watch television and let her beat him at crib beside a window in the common room.

Fundo, fundo, fundo
.

He set the matchstick pegs back into their starting positions on the crib board after his third loss in a row. “You’re a hard ticket, Lilly,” he said. “A damn good thing I don’t have any money riding on these games.”

Lilly was looking past his shoulder and smiling when he glanced up. And then he felt a hand on his neck, just the slightest touch. He turned his whole body to avoid straining his back. The woman had drawn her hand away quickly as if she’d scalded herself. She was portly and grey haired and there was something wrong with her face, a long, barely visible scar on one cheek surrounded by a patch of deadness. He shifted further in his chair to face her more directly and she took a step back, not out of any uncertainty but to have a better view of him.

She said, “I was just wanting to make sure.” She gestured at him. “That birthmark.”

Something in the woman stepped forward then, as if she moved out of a shadowed doorway into sunlight. As if the girl he’d known leaned out from the high window of what fifty years could do to deface a person. Eyes as green as sea-glass.

“Holy fuck,” he said. “Mercedes Parsons.”

“I thought you were dead, Wish.”

Delayed
was the word that came to his mind but he couldn’t manage to get it out. Mercedes watched him as calm as you please, not a feather out of her. And her composure fed the panic rising in him. She’d expected to find him here at this table, had tracked him down somehow. “My God, Mercedes,” he said.

She pulled out a chair to sit at the table. She said, “Hello, Lilly.”

Lilly bowed forward in her wheelchair.

He felt light-headed, almost drunk, smiling stupidly to cover his surprise, the rush of fear.
There’ll be no stopping her now
, was his thought. He fumbled with the box of matches, placed two more on the crib board and looked across to her as a question. They sat in silence while Wish shuffled and dealt. Through the course of that game and the next they spoke only what was required to play the hands or tally their points. He took refuge in the arbitrary fall of the cards, the simple patterns layered one on another as each hand played out, trying to guess what she was doing here, to figure out what he could get away with telling her. Mercedes seemed content to sit there as if they’d sat across from one another all their lives, as if nothing between them awaited answers or explanation or apology. Every time she smiled at him Wish felt much the same as he had that first afternoon in the Cove when he’d been waiting for her and she managed to surprise him anyway, standing in the doorway of the church hall. Expectant and caught out. Fearful, childish, impatient. All at sea.

On the far side of the room, the piano player stuttered out a song Wish knew from the war, the words called up in his head by the music:
We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when
. The tune seemed impossibly ancient to him, almost as old as light.

Lilly nodded off in her wheelchair. Wish considered taking her back to her room but was afraid of breaking the spell of the cards, of setting things between him and Mercedes off on another road. He dealt Lilly out of the game instead and they carried on with a two-hander. Wish knocking the cards for luck when he cut the deck. Kathleen came by to wheel the old woman down the hall to her bed and they played a while longer. But Lilly’s absence unsettled them, as if it pointed up a raft of other absences. Mercedes dealt a hand and looked up at him over her cards.

“What are you doing home?” he asked.

“My husband asked to have his ashes scattered up here.”

“He’s dead?”

“Three years now.”

He thought he should offer condolences but managed only to say, “How did you know to find me here?”

“I came by to see Lilly last week. Kathleen told me you were a regular visitor.”

“The fucking mouth on that one,” Wish said. He picked up his cards and moved them around aimlessly in his hand. “How did you know to find Lilly?”

He could see her hesitate as if she had concocted a lie and held it back at the last minute. She shrugged. “Just luck, I guess.”

The numbers and faces on the cards were meaningless to him, the light-headedness creeping back.

Mercedes said, “Tell me about Jim Harris.”

He glanced up quickly.

“Jim Harris,” she repeated. “He sent me a note and that length of string after the war. To say you were dead.”

It was an accusation she was making and he could feel the colour flooding his face. “You were already knocked up by then, weren’t you?” he said.

The uninjured side of her face startled, as if he’d slapped her.

“According to Hiram you were,” Wish said, trying to sound like less of an arsehole.

She said, “I waited for you until I—” She stopped and ran her hands along the length of her skirt. “I never heard a word from you,” she whispered.

He took out his handkerchief and wiped at his eyes.
Old man
, he thought. He cried at the drop of a hat these days, as if someone was turning on a tap in his head. He’d gone to the war memorial on the anniversary of D-Day and wept before the ceremony even started, wiping away snot with a handkerchief.
Pathetic old fucker
. He cleared his throat and looked away out the window.

“Jim Harris,” she said again.

“Jimmy Harris,” he said and he cleared his throat again. “He was with me in Nagasaki, him and Anstey. Anstey never made it out. And Harris got sick on the train home from San Francisco. Just racked up with cancer, wasted away to nothing.” Wish leaned forward to stare at his feet, one elbow on the table, the other on the back of the plastic chair.

“You were with him,” she said. “On that train home.”

“I was with him the whole time, Mercedes. I was with him when the bomb was dropped. And picking through the ruins afterwards.” He glanced across at her. “What made him sick was in me too, is what I mean. The doctors told me as much.” He shook his head. “No one should have to go through that,” he said. “To watch someone die like that.”

She picked up her cards. “I kept that note for a long time,” she said. “That and the string.” No sign of tears. A cold, calm fury.

“I made him write the note,” Wish said, straightening in the chair. “He wouldn’t do it at first. Said it was—” He tipped his head to one side, as if listening to a conversation across the room. “I told him,” he said. “I’d let him die alone if he didn’t.”

She rearranged the cards in her hand. Weighing things up in her mind, he could see, trying to redistribute the facts of her life in light of his sitting there in front of her. He expected she’d despise him before it was done and he couldn’t blame her for that.

Before the Japanese surrender, the POWs at Nagasaki #14 were divided into work groups and taken into the city to collect the dead and burn them. Hundreds and thousands lying about the ruins, some barely recognizable as human. Blackened bones—spine and pelvis, femurs, skulls—still warm to the touch days after the explosion. They salvaged bodies from beneath the rubble, torsos and arms and legs, like bizarre deep-sea creatures brought up into the light of day. They gathered the corpses into piles, dousing the pyres of flesh with gasoline before setting them alight. A piece of cloth tied over their faces against the dense, drifting stench. A blue, mineral twilight persisting all hours of the day. Wish saw a woman sitting on a concrete step that first morning, her neck and face and one side of her head scorched raw, the dull-white of her skull visible in spots through the tattered scalp. She was nursing an infant, the skin of the baby’s back bubbled by the heat of radiation. It looked to Wish like pork rind just out of the oven. The woman seemed barely aware of her surroundings, of the child in her arms.
Dead to the world
, was his thought. But he felt nothing for her or the infant. He was only a day out of the cells, every movement excruciating, and he struggled through the heavy work of hauling bodies with a grim satisfaction. Praying for as much again on every yellow bastard in the country.

Mercedes said, “Would you really have let Harris die alone?”

A hard little smile crossed his face. “I don’t know,” he said. “It was a long time ago.”

“The Wish I knew,” she said.

He shrugged.

She put her hands and her cards in her lap. “You never come looking?” she said. “Did you ever even think?”

“It was a long time ago, Mercedes.”

They walked together down the hall to Lilly’s room. Mercedes took his arm and he couldn’t think how to get clear of her hand until they stood back against opposite walls to let a resident go by in her wheelchair. He kept well to his side then so she couldn’t touch him without having to reach.

In Lilly’s room a young woman Wish didn’t know was sitting in a chair near the television. Mercedes said, “Hello, Bella.”

“I got tired of waiting downstairs,” the woman said. She was looking him up and down.

“This is my daughter,” Mercedes told him.

Wish stared at her and Mercedes in turn. “She’s too young,” he said.

Mercedes slapped him with the back of her hand. “I’m not
that
old.”

He caught himself and laughed, as if he’d intended only to make a joke, and introduced himself.

“Isabella,” she said, eyeing him warily.

He had no idea how much she knew of who he was.

Mercedes said, “How did you find Lilly’s room?”

“Ran into the Amazon as I came off the elevator.”

“Kathleen?”

“She told me I could wait for you here.” Bella stood up. “Are you ready to go, Mom?”

Mercedes looked around the room quickly. She seemed caught off guard by the question. She glanced at Wish but he refused to meet her eye. “All right,” she said. “I guess so, yes.”

Isabella walked out to the hall, where she waited for her mother. Mercedes was looking around the room again as if it had been her home for years and she was about to leave it for good.

“Mom,” Bella called.

“All right,” she said. “Goodbye, Lilly.” She turned to Wish and then went to the door. She stood there with her back to the room for a moment. “I’m going to visit the Cove,” she said. She looked back at him and Wish was struck by the length of the scar, the odd lifelessness on that side of her face, as if a stroke had paralyzed the muscles there. “Going to drive up to Fogo and see if I can’t find someone to take me across. You wouldn’t like to come, would you?”