The Rain Barrel Baby (6 page)

Denise spent the night in and out of sleep. When morning came she felt a queasiness in her stomach and achy all over but she’d had worse awakenings.

The curtains around her bed had been pushed back so when she sat up she could look both ways and see that all the other beds were occupied. Hers was in the middle, right across from the nursing station.

She had no idea how long she had been here.

Sun poured in the windows of the old building and landed on the two nurses at their station, some of it spilling over to one corner of Denise’s bed.

“Good morning, Denise,” the one named Ralph called.

An inkling of hope reared up and lay back down. Denise knew it was good that she woke up in this bed. She liked the small amount of routine that was provided for her here; she was good with routines.

It had occurred to her on occasion that she would have been a good candidate for the army, with all those early risings, physical training drills, shiny boots and punishments. Or the headmistress of a girls’ school, or better yet, the assistant headmistress. If she was going to do something properly she wanted someone else to tell her what it was. I am an unenviable person, thought Denise.

The breakfast trays arrived and the smiling Ralph slid one onto her bedside table.

“Thanks.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed a little too quickly and had to lie down again. She saw a stainless steel teapot on her tray and felt bile rise in her throat. Bracing herself on her elbows, she willed the vomit back down, tasting it.

“Ralph, wait. They’ve sent me tea. Is it possible for me to get coffee? I really hate tea, especially first thing in the morning.”

Ralph no longer had a smile on his face. Maybe it hadn’t been there in the first place.

“Mmm, not really,” he said. “There should be some instant coffee in the lounge if you want to make some yourself.”

Denise put on her robe and slippers and went through the double swinging doors into an empty hall.

In the washroom she splashed cool water on her face. Looking in the mirror, she was surprised and grateful that she didn’t look worse. The skin around her eyes had a bruised look, but that had been there forever.

She stuck out her tongue at her reflection. Turned it upside down. Her one trick. That’d be sure to impress someone.

“You’re going to die,” she said. She leaned her forehead against the mirror. Her eyes hurt so badly she wanted to pluck them from their sockets and stomp on them. Burst and deflate them.

“I could be blind,” she said. Blind would be better than this. No it wouldn’t. Please, God, I didn’t think that. Don’t make me blind.

Denise vomited into the sink.

Why am I so wide awake all of a sudden? she wondered. They must have had me on something and taken me off it.

The last few days were a blur, images fighting for space at the front of her mind: a woman lying in her own filth, her own voice calling for a nurse. What day was it?

The lounge was empty but held the stale smoke of last night’s insomniacs. She tried the small dirty window but it wouldn’t budge. It looked out onto the parking lot of the emergency room where she had been admitted. Ambulance attendants were unloading someone while a small elderly woman watched. Probably her life mate of sixty years was on his way out and she didn’t have a shoulder to lean on. Or, maybe it was a death long overdue and in her mind she was tripping the light fantastic.

The room contained two brown Naugahyde couches that looked eighty years old, and a few metal folding chairs. In the centre of the room was a low wooden table that held an assortment of old copies of
Field and Stream
and
Golf Digest
. The walls had been painted green many years before and the whole effect matched the way Denise felt on the inside. A perfect fit.

She found the kettle and a jar of instant coffee on a table in the corner. The coffee was decaf and the jar was empty.

Dr. Wim Winston walked into the lounge carrying two large coffees from Tim Horton’s. For a moment, Denise wondered if she was hallucinating.

“Wim?”

“Hi, Denise.”

He said her name the same, as though it was something that he wanted to have his way with. She remembered that it used to make her crazy to hear him say her name. It no longer had that effect on her.

“I saw that you had been admitted. I’m working in emergency now.”

“Is one of those for me?”

He handed her one of the paper cups. “Black. Right?”

“Right.”

Wim had become one of those men who combed thin strands of lubed-up hair up over his head to the wrong side. One of the strands had come free and hung like a dirty noodle down almost to his shoulder on the side where it belonged.

“I came to see you before but you were sleeping,” he said.

“What day is it?”

“Thursday.”

Denise wondered how she could have been with this man. She’d known him since way back before Frank. He had been built like her husband, tall and skinny. Both men had filled out over the years, Wim more so than Frank. Even his head had filled out, the way some men’s do. Frank’s head had stayed thin.

Denise had thought she loved him a long time ago when love was based on fewer things. He said he loved her too back then, but he had given her up without a word at about the same time he entered medical school. And Denise had met Frank.

Wim Winston ended up marrying a fellow doctor. They had kids and lived somewhere nice and Denise envied them.

But that didn’t mean much. She envied pretty well everyone, even other drunks whose situations differed from hers, or didn’t. Everyone’s life looked better than hers.

She should never have had children. Often she didn’t feel like a mother at all. She felt younger than Emma. And no good to anyone.

Denise was so tired of herself, of her thoughts and of the feelings that choked her and moved like clenched fists up and down her esophagus.

“Oh, Denise,” Wim said now. His eyes searched hers and she looked away.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said.

“What! I am not! I’m a mess, Wim. A complete mess.”

“I’m going to help you.” He came closer than he should have as a doctor and smoothed the hair away from her face.

She backed into the coffee table. It pressed into the backs of her knees. His hair smelled greasy.

“Apparently I’m supposed to want to help myself,” she said, thinking that doctors shouldn’t have dirty hair.

“Do you?” Wim asked.

“Sometimes.”

Denise edged around him and perched on the end of one of the couches. She took a sip of her coffee and set it down.

Wim sat down beside her and took both of her hands in his. He brushed his lips against her hair and she leapt up and moved toward the door. He followed her.

“What are you doing, Wim? This is insane.” She looked into his strange familiar face. “You can’t be doing this.”

“Why not?” he said and tried to kiss her lips.

“I just barfed, for one thing.”

Denise backed out the doorway and made her way back to the ward.

She was exhausted. His being here wasn’t a good thing. She regretted having ever slept with him, even if it was a lifetime ago. Was that why he thought he could touch her in that way? How could he think that? She dreaded seeing him again, hoped he’d leave her alone.

Dread and regret. Regret and dread. Denise didn’t own anything solid and true. She felt like one of those cartoon characters made up of broken lines, indicating ghostliness, invisibility.

Her head throbbed and her knees buckled as she tottered toward her bed. Ralph was stripping the sheets from the narrow mattress as she approached and there was nowhere for her to be.

Her last conscious thought as her legs crumpled beneath her was of her father leaning over her bed performing an operation on her with a familiar-smelling liquid. She was six and had gone to sleep with bubble gum in her mouth. It had fallen into her hair while she slept and this whole removal process started before she woke up. Her dad was gentle. Her mum was in the background giving the orders. Not gentle.

When Denise came to, she was in her newly made bed and Ralph was hovering.

She looked away. Her eyes burned and her lips felt caked with something. She didn’t want to look at Ralph. He smelled medicinal. Or maybe that was her.

Denise didn’t like Ralph. He didn’t love her and she needed someone there who did, if there was such a person. Or else she wasn’t going to be able to do this.

She drifted off again inside a dream about Garth. Her little boy.

She is sitting in a lawn chair with her feet resting on the edge of a plastic wading pool. It’s so hot, the hottest day of the year and the whole family is in the yard cooling off in the sprinkler and pool. Garth fills his toy pail with water and pours it slowly over her feet. The cool water, the cool, cool water is better than a swim in the ocean. Garth is matter-of-fact about his action; he isn’t smiling. His pink tongue sticks conscientiously out the side of his mouth. He’s helping. Her Garth.

1961

Ray sits as far away from her as he can in the back seat of the ’53 Ford. They’re in trouble. They were arguing over which station to listen to on the car radio and the mother turned it off. Ray wants
CKY
with Del Shannon singing “Runaway.” She wants
CKRC
with Connie Francis singing “Where the Boys Are.” The mother wants them to shut up. They do.

They’re on the highway between Starbuck and Fannystelle. It’s as dark as night gets in the summer on the prairies with the full moon and the stars and the odd lamp-lit farmhouse. The kids were rousted from their beds to satisfy the whim of their mother. She thinks it’s the right time to introduce her newest friend, Cy, to her relatives in Morden. It’s Cy’s car; he lets their mother drive while he leans against the passenger door in the front seat. He snores and she pokes him from time to time. Cy snorts awake and mutters some, then settles back into a regular rhythm.

“Stop!” Ray yells. “Mum, stop!” The mother didn’t see the awkward angle of the headlights shining out of the ditch or if she did, chose to keep on driving. But her son’s shouts make her slam on the brakes and bring the car to a screeching halt before she has a chance to think. The four of them hurtle forwards and then sideways as she jerks the old Ford onto the soft shoulder.

Ray leaps out of the car before it has stopped moving. “It’s an accid-” he cries.

Those are the last words he speaks, before the semi-trailer clips him and the car door from their places on the road and catapults them into the starry night. She runs after her brother. No one tries to stop her. She finds him, without his glasses, staring up at her from his bed of flax. She kneels to hold him, to give him some of what he has so often given her. But she sees there is no one there to hold. It’s just a face, on its own, flat on the blue night field of flax.

She hears the voice of Connie Francis coming from the car radio. She thinks that if someone changed the station, if she could hear Del Shannon’s familiar voice singing “Runaway,” she would have her brother back, intact. He would be more than a face in the flax.

The Present

In a room in a house with windows facing the swollen Assiniboine River, Simon Grace lay on a couch worrying about Ivy. He was afraid he had made a mistake in marrying her. The thought made him laugh out loud. They had been together for nearly twenty years.

Simon lay under a quilt with pillows propping him up so he could watch the river. He was seventy-seven years old and not feeling very well. He had hoped for comfort in his old age and knew that he wasn’t going to get it, except for what he could manage to provide for himself.

It had started out perfectly. Ivy had wanted to please him and she had. She knew how to look and exactly what to say, sometimes to a fault. He found himself wanting to see a hair out of place, wanting to see her drunk, letting something slip.

He never knew her at all, even in the beginning, he realized now. Oh, they had golfed and dined and traveled together. They had even talked and kissed and laughed together. But she was always like a date for him, on her best behaviour. He had never heard her hiccup. And she left the room if she felt a sneeze coming on.

She had done her duty by him, he supposed, if duty was what you were looking for, in exchange for the security he had to offer. He never kidded himself that it had been anything more than that. But he couldn’t keep himself from expecting more.

Everyone warned him against her: his kids, his friends, his colleagues, even his ex-wife, Irene, who he knows did it from a good place in her heart. Oh, she was jealous, of course she was. How could she, at fifty-five, have competed with Ivy in her early twenties? She didn’t even try, just packed her bags. And then spurned his offer of the house because that was where she had found them together.

Ivy had engineered that, he was sure of it. The house on Wellington Crescent was a necessary part of the package. The Simon Grace package.

He thought about Irene now and remembered how they used to swim together after dark up at the lake. Even later when the girls were all grown up. They’d pad down to the beach in their bathrobes and beach shoes and leave them by the water’s edge. Their bodies had felt so good together in the cool water of Lake Winnipeg.

When he thought of Irene he always pictured her at Victoria Beach. That was where she loved it most. It was right that she have the cottage. He missed her and envied her too, with her connection to both girls. They hadn’t come to see him for years. He had never seen his grandchildren. Maybe they didn’t even know he existed.

He had paid heavily for choosing Ivy. But he had gone in with his eyes open. And now he didn’t have enough strength left to try and get out.

But he would love to see his daughters; he had thought they’d come round.

With all Ivy’s attributes, her skills at running his household, acting as hostess, volunteering at the museum, and without question appearing beautiful on his arm, she couldn’t manage any warmth. Simon saw her try. She tried so hard it hurt him to watch. But she couldn’t do it. And he could live with that. With the coolness.

But something had changed in the last few years. There was something else now. She had purpose for the first time since he had known her, a purpose that he was sure wasn’t connected to him. And he feared it, sensed that it didn’t bode well. It was practically a living thing, dwelling in the house with them, moving through the rooms like a poison mist.

It had started a couple of years back and intensified during the year that she spent away. A year and some months ago, Ivy went to Vancouver for a while. She told him she wanted to take some computer courses at an expensive west coast school, better herself.

Ivy hadn’t been in the work force for years — since he’d married her, in fact. Why would she need to sharpen her computer skills?

“You don’t need bettering,” he had said.

“You know I do,” she said and bared her teeth. A smile.

When Ivy returned she said nothing about her courses and Simon didn’t ask. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what she’d been up to. He had no idea how she had spent her time in Vancouver. She had looked so beautiful when she came back last fall. Whatever she’d done agreed with her. She had glowed. She’d filled out in a way that appealed to Simon. And her clothes were different, long and flowing. They suited her new softness.

Simon thought that women today, including Ivy, were far too concerned about staying overly slim. He’d loved her new look, but he wasn’t allowed to touch. That had stopped a long time ago.

But anyway, Ivy’s plumpness was short-lived. She had worked very hard at slimming down again, and toning up, exercising like a fiend.

Simon started to cry now, a few thin tears at first and then his body was wracked with sobs. His loneliness suffused him like a drug, entering every vein, every cell.

“It’s too late,” he moaned, surprising himself with his words. “It’s too late,” he said again before fear clutched his insides when he saw Ivy looking in through the window at him. She had come around the back way. Who knew why? Who knew why this woman did anything? But it was too late. She had seen him crying and perhaps had even heard him. He cringed with embarrassment.

Ivy chose not to come in, but walked back around the front of the house to another entrance. He was grateful for that, grateful for her aversion to him in his mire of loneliness.

His hand fell down to touch the head of Lucy, the black Lab that had kept him company for the last thirteen years. She snuffled contentedly in her sleep. She wasn’t feeling very well these days either and Simon knew he was going to have to put her down soon. He would like to die along with her. If only it were that easy.

“Oh, Lucy girl, we’re a fine old pair.”

He scratched her gently behind her ear. He wanted her to wake up. She stirred and licked his hand before settling her head between her paws to continue her snooze. Simon sighed and closed his eyes.

He could hear Ivy moving in another part of the house. It sounded as if she was in his study. What possible reason could she have for being there, for carrying her poison into his private sanctuary? He knew he wouldn’t mention it to her. He feared her. It wasn’t a specific fear, like a fear of dying or a fear of high places. It was vaguer than that: a fear that she could cause harm in ways he wasn’t even able to imagine.

“My wife scares the hell out of me, Lucy.”

The dog slept on and Simon lay stiff under his quilt and stared straight up at the ceiling.

Ivy ran her fingers along the smooth edge of the flawless oak desk. She liked the feel of the wood, well-cared for over decades of use. And she liked the smell of this room too. It was leather and paper and the lemon oil that Lena used to polish up the old wood.

Simon’s computer sat on the desk. After months of trying, with no success, Ivy’s prayers had led her here. She had realized that the Internet could be a useful tool for her. She used it to find information that helped her in the execution of her plan. It led her to the decision to spend one year away from home, in Vancouver. If she couldn’t accomplish it in a year, then she would…well, she hadn’t known what she would do next.

Now she’d been back from the coast for several months and was biding her time. She still prayed every day at mid-morning, but Gruck was seldom there to answer her. Sometimes another voice came. Male. This voice confused her because it was soothing and led her in comfortable directions. It interfered with the plans G had for her. And so did the Squeaks, though she could never remember her Squeak-related thoughts.

The last thing G had told her was to contact Frank Foote, but Ivy felt she needed more. She couldn’t go to visit Frank and have absolutely nothing to say, could she? She was starting to think that she might have to trust that Gruck would advise her after she got there.

If the influence of the male voice and the Squeaks continued to erode her plan, it would mean the last two years, four months, five days, sixteen hours and — she looked at her watch — five minutes, would have been for nothing and that made her head scream.

She would have to go ahead. If G didn’t show up in the room with her the worst that would happen is that she would make a fool of herself. She could do that.

Ivy stared at her surroundings. She envied the people who were lucky enough to really belong in such a room. She knew it was hers; that had been the plan. But she still felt as though she was outside with her dirty face pressed against the window of the room with the blazing fire and the family photos on the grand piano. Not her family.

She pulled the chain on the desk lamp and it made little difference in the late afternoon light. She pulled it again. And again. Again. Then she counted the items on the desk and made a note of the number on a slip of paper that she took from its hiding place behind
Fifth Business
. Robertson Davies was her husband’s favourite writer and he owned all his books. They were lined up in order in the middle of a shelf directly across the room from his desk. So he could see them and admire them, she supposed. A few of the books were signed by the author himself and her husband loved that fact.

She pulled
The Rebel Angels
from its place on the shelf and moved it one over, to the other side of
What’s Bred in the Bone
. Then she smiled. That’d throw him for a loop. She left the room and closed the door behind her.

Lena watched her leave and Ivy saw her but pretended that she didn’t. She didn’t feel like having to think of any words to say to the housekeeper or cook or nurse or whatever she was. Ivy could feel her hatred. This was what Dr. Braun had called paranoia and Ivy had tried for a while to think of hatred differently. But it was too hard. She had quit Dr. Braun and his needling ways. It was close to three years now since her last visit to his downtown office.

She had gone to see him once a month for several years, at Simon’s insistence. He had been worried about her nightmares, her screams in the night. Mostly the doctor just prescribed drugs, but now and then toward the end he had wanted her to talk and that was why she had quit.

She didn’t want to talk, not in the sense that he wanted her to. Why talk? It hurt — like her nightmares. And the drugs pretty much took care of those.

That was the only bad part about not going to see him anymore. Without him there were no pills. She knew she screamed again at night sometimes because she woke herself up with it. But she was pretty sure it was only now and then.

She had almost decided to go back to Dr. Braun, to make up things to talk about that wouldn’t hurt. So she could get the pills back. But then her plan had been set in motion. And her plan was almost as good as the drugs for stopping her nightmares.

She slept at the other end of the house from Simon now so when she did scream it probably didn’t bother him as much as it used to when they had shared a bed. One night she had frightened him so badly he thought he was having a heart attack. They actually ended up chuckling about it in the brightness of the next morning. But in the heart of that dark night there had been no laughter.

Ivy considered visiting her husband on his couch now. But she shuddered at the thought of his sniveling old form under the quilt. She snatched up her car keys from the hall table and headed out the front door with no particular destination in mind. Just away from here.