I Was There the Night He Died Page 14

  “So he was married?”

  “Happily. For many, many years.”

  “And he didn’t shoot heroin into his eyeball or anything?”

  “Enjoyed a quality puff and the occasional pint of cider, but nothing that didn’t make the music sound better and every moment more alive.”

  “He doesn’t sound like he was too concerned with being a neglected genius or whatever.”

  “Was too busy having a good time to worry too much about it, I guess.”

  I’m suddenly very tired, like after an hour of good love making or like coming back to your own bed after a pleasant but long trip. In spite of the furnace blowing out warm air, Samantha still has her jacket on, but at some point she’s taken off her running shoes and tucked her feet underneath her on the couch. She looks sleepy too. Then she doesn’t; looks instead like she’s just woken up late for an important exam and there’s no way she’s going to make it in time.

  “What happened to him?” she says.

  “You know what happened to him.”

  She looks at me; I look at the floor.

  “Why?” she says.

  “Why what?”

  “Why does every story have to end this way?”

  “I don’t know. They just do.”

  “No they don’t.”

  “Yeah, they do.”

  Neither of us says anything else or even moves—is ever going to move. They’re going to find us here in the spring in these exact same positions. I look up.

  “When Hartford’s widow gave the mortician the bag containing the suit she wanted him buried in, somehow his prized Batman cape got mixed up in there. The mortician was obviously a little surprised when he opened up the bag at the funeral home, but figured that since the deceased was an artist, it was probably what his widow wanted. People showed up for the viewing the next day and were understandably a little taken aback, but Hartford’s widow took one look and laughed. “Leave it,” she said. “John would have loved it.’”

  Chapter Nine

  The staff at Thames View do everything they can, but they can’t do everything. Like trim errant ear hairs, for example. Every resident receives a monthly haircut whether he needs it or not, but unsightly ear hair or overgrown eyebrows are, if anyone’s, the family’s responsibility. And no matter how dirty his work clothes were at the end of the day or how much grease ended up underneath his fingernails, those same clothes and nails were always workday-ready clean whenever he left the house, and nose hairs were tweezered and eyebrows trimmed with just as much weekly dutifulness as Friday’s banking and Saturday’s trip to the beer store. I’d made Uncle Donny promise to pick up the plucking and trimming slack once Dad wasn’t capable anymore, and he’d kept his promise. Now that’s he’s persona non Donny, however, it’s my turn to take up the tweezers.

  The bus takes nearly half an hour to get to Thames View, but at least there’s a stop directly across the street. Before I visit Dad I have a word with Mrs. Hampton about how best to go about hiring a part-time nurse to do all of the little things that Uncle Donny used to do and I presently am but one day I won’t be able to, except when I come back to visit. As soon as the house is sold and my Visa debt is paid off, everything that’s left over is going into an account to pay for the part-time nurse and the cable bill and anything else Dad needs. I did the math, and Dad will never outlive the money from the house sale.

  I’m stomping any remaining slush water from my boots onto the mushy black mat just outside Dad’s room when I see the elderly woman with the cane, the one who I’d thought whacked me with it, shuffling down the corridor, cane in one hand, a handful of bright red cards gripped in the other. I’m wondering whether I should ask her if she needs any help, when I’m saved, a young woman wearing a Thames View nametag hurries behind her down the hall.

  “Mrs. Evans,” she says, “you know all those cards don’t belong to you. Now please give them to me.”

  The old woman stops, looks at the mess of red missives in her hand, says, “I’m sorry. I don’t know how that happened.”

  “That’s all right. But those Valentines are for everyone. You need to remember to share.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right. Now, can you get back to your room all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right then, off you go.”

  I smile at the old woman as I pass—hopefully not too sympathetically—wishing that I’d remembered it was Valentine’s Day next week and that I was in the habit of carrying a surplus of cards to distribute to the lonely and long-forgotten, when she curls an arthritis-knotted finger my way.

  Softly, but perfectly clearly, “My coffin is much nicer than hers,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  “That bitch.”

  “Right.”

  “That fucking bitch.” And then, for emphasis, she cracks me across my shin with her cane.

  Rubbing my leg, Look on the bright side, I think. At least now I know I wasn’t imagining it the first time.

  “Good evening.”

  It’s Jean, one of Thames View’s care workers, come to help Dad back to bed and settle him in for the night. Almost every evening after dinner I try to mix things up a bit by having us change places, prop Dad up in his chair for a short vertical vacation while I sit on the bed. Jean greets every resident with the same congenial, yet never syrupy good morning or good afternoon or good evening, but this time I think she’s speaking to me.

  “Hello.” I stand up from the bed, ready to assist in any way I can, although I know I likely won’t be needed. Jean is short and squat—almost square—with plump, veiny forearms and powerful, bowed legs.

  “And where is Mr. Samson this evening?” I look at my dad, then back at her—math was never my best subject, but I’ve always been able to count to two with virtually no outside help.

  Seeing my confusion, “Mr. Samson’s brother,” she says. “I’m not used to tucking Mr. Samson in without his brother being here.”

  Jean’s been on vacation for the last few weeks, and this, I know, is where I’m supposed to explain where Uncle Donny is. Instead, I ask, “Do you need a hand with … ?” With lugging my cement-sack of a father into bed, the same man whose back I once-upon-a-time used to giddily ride on, whose biceps I would delightfully dangle from, whose mat of thick black chest hair seemed as much of what a man could ever hope to be as anything I could possibly imagine?

  With one hand stuck firmly underneath his right armpit and the other wrapped tight around the small of his back, Jean addresses my dad, not me, with “Ready, Mr. Samson? Here we go now: one, two, three, four,” and dances my puppet father one-step, two-step, all the way to the edge of the bed, where, just like he’s supposed to, he sits and stares and waits for his housecoat and slippers to be removed. If melancholic reflections upon the tragic passing of time are what you’re after, a writer is the right person for the job; if, however, you want your moribund father to be efficiently and safely moved from Point A to Point B, ask a patient care worker.

  First the slippers, left then right, then the housecoat, then carefully but firmly laying him back and tucking him in, then the hard survey to ensure that everything is as it should be. I watch Jean watch my dad, thankful that another day is done, thankful that Jean is watching over him. By the way she remains standing there, though, hands-on-hips, I know something is amiss.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  “Nothing’s exactly wrong … ” She pulls the top blanket down an inch or so from underneath my father’s chin, folds it over so that his chest is fully covered but his neck is exposed and free. “It’s just that, although it might not seem so sometimes to you or me, people with your father’s disease crave reassurance through habit, routine. Even people whose disease is as advanced as your father’s. It makes them feel more settled, somehow.”

/>   “Right. So what can we do? What can I do?”

  “Well, it’s just that your uncle used to read to him before he went to sleep.”

  “My uncle? My Uncle Donny?”

  “Every night that I can remember since your father’s been with us.”

  My Uncle Donny who skims the back of breakfast cereal boxes to get to the good parts. The same man who, when he saw me reading once in a lawn chair in the backyard as a teenager, asked me how I could do that when it was so nice outside I could be doing anything?

  “What does he read him?” I say.

  “I don’t know what you’d call them, but those slips of paper you can get at the convenience store or at the grocery store with all the hockey games listed on them that you can bet on. He’d read those.”

  “Betting slips? Pro-Line betting slips?”

  “I don’t know their name, but the government one, the one that says who’s playing who and how much you can win.”

  Pro-Line betting slips. Montreal at Boston, the Bruins paying one and a half at home, the road team paying out two and a quarter, who sounds like the best bet? Christ. I don’t know whether I should be angry or appreciative. Christ.

  * * *

  “What do you call it when people cut themselves? On purpose, I mean.”

  Rachel lifts her head off my chest; lies on her side, head resting in her hand. “I guess it was as good for you as it was for me.”

  “No complaints here, believe me,” I say, sliding my hand underneath the sheet and placing it on her naked back. Rachel’s sheets are white Egyptian cotton and 1000 thread count, almost as soft as her skin.

  “Do you own a dog?” she says.

  “Why?”

  “Do you?”

  “I used to. Why?”

  “You just patted me. And it’s not the first time, either.”

  “I didn’t pat you.” I almost say I caressed you, but that doesn’t sound right either, sounds too intimate, like something a long-time lover might do. “I stroked you.”

  “Whatever you say,” she says, getting up from the bed, sheet wrapped around her like a toga. “Just don’t expect me to fetch your pipe and slippers.”

  Except for in bed—and once on the rug—I’ve yet to see Rachel naked. You would have thought she’d want to show off her new and improved body every opportunity she got. It’s crossed my mind to ask her what it feels like to look like—to be—someone else, but I figure it’s really none of my business. If she wanted to talk about it, she’d talk about it.

  “Cutters,” she calls through the closed bathroom door.

  “What?”

  “You asked me what people who injure themselves are called. Cutters. Although I think self-mutilators is the preferred expression.”

  The toilet flushes, and Rachel, wearing a thick white cotton housecoat, emerges from the bathroom. She takes the remote off one of the side tables and clicks on the television. There’s a TV in nearly every room of her apartment.

  “I’ll just be in and out,” I say, sliding out of bed and heading for the shower.

  “Why bother then?”

  I stop at the bathroom door. “What do you mean?”

  She hesitates. “Nothing,” she says. “Take your shower.” Rachel sits on the end of the bed, right leg crossed over left, the remote control in her hand, flipping channels.

  “If it’s a problem for me to use the shower, I won’t.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, but … ”

  “But no I didn’t. So shower already.”

  I’m considering putting at least my underwear on and finding out what she’s obviously upset about when she saves me the trouble of looking for them.

  “It’s just that, it’s as if you can’t stand to smell like me for five minutes after we’ve had sex.”

  “That’s why you’re angry?”

  Rachel finally finds something worth leaving on—a reality show I can only presume—five sulky twenty-somethings slouching around an enormous glass table and all yelling at each other at the same time.

  “I told you,” I say. “I like to shower when I’m here only because I don’t want to dirty the bathroom at home any more than I have to, because of the people coming over to look at the house. Laura says a dirty bathroom can be a real deal breaker.”

  “Oh, well, if Laura says it.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Nothing. Except that apparently Laura Mackenzie is still running my life.”

  “In what possible … ” I interrupt my question because I realize I don’t want Rachel to answer it. She’s beautiful and happy now—as happy as anybody else, anyway—and Laura isn’t. What else could she want? I realize I don’t want to know the answer to that question either. “Look, this is just about trying to keep a clean bathroom, all right? That’s all.”

  “If you say so.”

  “That’s the only reason.”

  “Okay.”

  “Really.”

  “Okay.” She shows she’s serious about ending the argument by looking at me and away from the TV, although without switching it off or even turning the sound down. One of the girls on the program shouts, “I drownded it because it wouldn’t stop going off!” and the others laugh and whoop and bang on the table. I’d been in enough spats with Sara to know that arguing etiquette dictates that I go to Rachel and hug her to help put this misunderstanding officially behind us, but I stay where I am, in the doorway to the bathroom.

  “So why do you think people do it?” I say. “The cutters, I mean.”

  “Why the sudden interest in self-mutilation? Do you have something you want to tell me?”

  “I think a friend might be one. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  “A friend.”

  “Sort of a friend, yeah.”

  “If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Totally fine.”

  “Thanks.”

  Rachel looks back to the television. “Can you please go take your shower now?”

  * * *

  I worked all day and the work went well—put down nearly five hundred words in fact, many of which I’m optimistic will survive tomorrow afternoon’s revising scything. When the words do what you tell them to and occasionally—miraculously—tell you things you didn’t even know you knew, there’s very little temptation to check your e-mails or troll for records on eBay or Google the soft drink Wink, your dad’s preferred gin mix, just so you can find out once and for all what year they stopped making it. And when the laptop is shut tight and that day’s word total tallied, the delightful illogicality of feeling exhaustingly empty and yet, somehow, simultaneously brimming bursting. Then: a hot shower, a cold beer, and the rest of the day or night wide open and earned. Lucky days like these, I almost forget that the best part of it is over, that Barney isn’t going to be whimpering at the front door later on because Sara is home from work and on the porch fishing for her keys in her bag and that we aren’t going to phone in our usual takeout order to the Vietnamese place around the corner and pick it up on our way home from taking Barney for his evening walk with a quick stop at the Film Buff to select that night’s DVD. And even if they were out of pan-fried noodles and forgot to substitute tofu for shrimp in the mixed vegetables again and the movie was a howling farce that unfortunately was advertised as a serious drama and the dog decided he needed to go outside for a pee five minutes after the lights had been turned off and tomorrow morning’s alarm had been set, it was still going to be Sara and Barney and me. The world might have been skulking around outside, but we were our own world all together inside, and how could it ever be otherwise?

  The only thing that got in the way of getting done what had to get done today was when, taking a break an hour or so in—popping a fresh can of Mountain D
ew, kneading the small of my back while staring out the front window—I felt a sudden, unexpected sensation of excitement I couldn’t account for. The same thing happens sometimes when a feeling of anxiety or anger invades your mind but you can’t remember what you’re supposed to be so upset about. That kind of amnesia is to be encouraged. This time, though, I took a sip and concentrated but still couldn’t recollect what I was apparently supposed to be so pleased about; until, sitting back down at the kitchen table and my computer, it came to me: I was going to see Samantha tonight. I was going to see her after my work was done and I was going to tell her who died tonight, who I’d been writing about. I was also somehow going to get her to talk about those marks on her arms. It took me fifteen minutes online—during which I bid successfully on a rare promotional copy of David Bromberg’s eponymous debut album—before my mind was back on Willie P. Bennett and why his music mattered and what both it and his life had to tell us. Later on, when my cell phone rang and Rachel’s name came up on the caller I.D., I let it go to voice mail.

  The pockmarked moon blushing high and bright and white and the doors of Buttercup Village locked and double-locked tight for the night are my cues to occupy the park bench and for Samantha to see me sitting there and to take her spot on the swing set. So I don’t. Samantha’s no Lolita and I’m definitely not some horny Humbert—which would be disgusting, but at least explicable—so what do I want with an eighteen year-old self-mutilating pothead? And I’ve got a girlfriend—sort of; a woman who I can spend time with, anyway, if spending time with a woman is what I want.

  I manage half-an-hour’s worth of garbage-bagging my mother’s clothes for drop-off at the Salvation Army before the aroma of her favourite perfume, Downy fabric softener, spooks me out of my parents’ bedroom. Leading to nearly forty-five minutes of filling cardboard box after cardboard box with my father’s tools, each thump and clank an indifferent affront to every meticulously cleaned and carefully stowed object. Resulting in finally listening to Rachel’s phone message, the gist of it being that if I wasn’t doing anything tonight and didn’t want to just sit around my parents’ house feeling lonely, why didn’t I call her back and she could pick me up and we could go to her place and have a drink and talk and just, well, whatever. I erase the message and open a bottle of red and grab my coat.