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  VIATICUM

  VIATICUM

  A Novel

  Natelle Fitzgerald

  Copyright © 2019 by Natelle Fitzgerald

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior ­written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations ­embodied in reviews.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s ­imagination or are used ­fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Viaticum : a novel / Natelle Fitzgerald.

  Names: Fitzgerald, Natelle, 1977– author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana 20190154756 | ISBN 9781988098876 (softcover)

  Classification: LCC PS8611.I8913 V53 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Printed and bound in Canada on 100% recycled paper.

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Now Or Never Publishing

  901, 163 Street

  Surrey, British Columbia

  Canada V4A 9T8

  nonpublishing.com

  Fighting Words.

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for our publishing program.

  For my husband, Pierre.

  Viaticum:

  1. Holy Communion given to one dying or in danger of death.

  2. Supplies or money for a journey.

  PROLOGUE

  Tall, gaunt, silent, his head bent forward in an attitude of prayer, Matt Campbell sat beside the dying man and imagined a calm, clear pool of water. He pictured the pale, round stones on the bottom; he imagined a soothing coolness across his own brow. If he could only make his own mind still enough, his own thoughts clear enough, he believed or hoped or wished that the dying man, from whatever shadow realm he now wandered, might perceive his presence by the bedside and know, in some way, on some level, that he was not alone. It was all there was left to do.

  Hours passed. A square of sunlight crept across the grey flagstones then up onto the bed, warming the intricate reds and ­yellows of the batik quilt that Sasha had brought back from Indonesia; then it stretched across, the carnations on the nightstand suddenly numinous, the light in the room turning gold then deepening, like autumn, like evening; then, just when it seemed that twilight had finally descended, a last gasp of daylight pierced the far window and flared with strange and sudden brilliance on a small, framed photograph that was half-hidden by the flowers.

  Look at us. See us. The light was piercing, urgent. Matt leaned forward and picked the picture up off the nightstand. For weeks, he’d avoided looking at it; it felt too intimate, too private, too deep. Now, he studied the faces there, running his fingers gently over the glass.

  The picture showed a slim young woman with dark hair cut in straight bangs across her forehead; a little boy of about four or five sat on her lap, his smile so gleeful Matt could almost hear a gurgle of childish laughter just looking at him. This was the man’s wife and son, he assumed, and yet there’d been no sign of them, no mention of their absence. It made him sad. He kept hoping they’d show, but they didn’t.

  Instead, it was the man’s ageing parents that stayed with him at the hospice. A few of his co-workers had visited also: big, strapping oil-workers who’d driven all the way from North Dakota on their week off, who’d swaggered in full of brave humor and good intentions, then grown awkward and self-conscious when they saw their friend so whittled away by cancer. Why did it tear his heart so badly to see these big, strong men acting so unsure? Matt had made a point to be extra kind to them, to let them know that the quiet halls, the artwork, the beautiful healing space that Sasha had taken such exquisite care to create, was for them also, lumbering and imperfect as they were.

  They were like him, he thought, how he used to be.

  He sighed, then gently placed the picture back on the nightstand, careful to arrange it exactly as it had been, but the light, its urgency, was gone. Was he wrong to have read some meaning into it? Some demand? He was allowing this death to get to him, he knew. It was the man’s age, the nature of his disease, taking Matt back to things best left alone. Matt shook his head, hoping to clear it. Again, he closed his eyes. Again, he tried to picture the pool.

  Suddenly, the man’s breathing began to change. It was a subtle difference, an airiness, a frailty, something indescribable; yet Matt recognized it right away. He’d heard it before. The man’s breath hiccupped, then caught, then hiccupped again. It was time. He went out to the hall and called Sasha, then went to find the parents.

  They weren’t in the reading room or at reception, so he continued out through the main entrance, then across the lawn, past the pond, the walking trail, the quiet benches tucked under the trees. Down the hill, the lights of Saltery Bay twinkled along the edge of the harbor; the water in the bay was still milky and full of light, the dark shapes of the hills rising sharply all around it. He paused for a moment, looking down. The town had the same smallness, the same slowness as when he’d arrived here years ago; yet how different it appeared to him now! The first time he’d set foot on the island it had been foggy; the town an orange smear in the darkness, like a fire burning under a cloud. It had seemed so sinister to him then, jealous of its lies, its secrets. He shivered. He did not like to think about that time in his life, but this death, this relatively young man . . . it haunted him. Crossing his arms over his chest and pulling his sweater tight around him, he hurried on.

  At the back of the property where the lawn butted up against the forest, he came to a tiny chapel. The building was already cloaked in shadow, barely visible except for a small flickering in the stained-glass windows. He breathed a sigh of relief. The parents were inside. He’d found them. He took a deep breath, then paused before entering. No matter how much people prepared, no matter how long they’d been expecting it, news of death’s imminent arrival always came as a shock. He stood for a moment, wishing the parents peace; then slowly, quietly, he opened the chapel door.

  They were seated in the front pew, leaning against one another, maybe sleeping. Light from a tiered rack of candles washed over them, lapping up against the arched beams of the ceiling, glittering on the icons on the altar: Jesus on the cross, a smiling Buddha, a cosmic Ganesh, amongst the many others Sasha had collected in her travels. Death is the one thing we all share, she’d told him once, the only universal, and then, out of nowhere, another memory, not in Sasha’s voice, not in his own but a whisper, like someone leaning close and whispering in his ear: everybody dies . . . and suddenly the candles became the city lights streaking by and his face began to prickle with shame.

  When he shook himself free, he found that the parents had turned in their seats and were staring at him: the woman, tiny and frail with fading hair and fading skin, the ghost of a great beauty in the cut of her cheeks; the man a mirror of what the son must have been: tall, broad-shouldered, stoic. Matt cleared his throat. “It’s time,” he said as softly as he could. “You should come and be with him now. Please, follow me.”

  He led them gently, oh so gently, across the lawn, then back to the room where they knelt, one on each side of the bed, ­holding their dying son’s hands. The mother whispered softly but Matt couldn’t make out her words. The father said, “I love you, I love you,” in a strangled voice then was silent. Matt turned on the lamp. He stood quietly next to the door.

  Soon, Sasha arrived, cold colouring her cheeks, clinging to her sweater. As a palliative nurse and the hospice owner, she always came at
the end, in case there were complications. She nodded to Matt as she entered the room and he took his leave.

  He went back outside and crossed to the far side of the property, passed the maintenance shed to where a small trailer stood half-hidden amongst a tangle of black berry and alder. A wave of relief swept over him: he was home.

  When the door was shut safely behind him, he crumpled. All the tension he’d been holding inside left him in a great whoosh of air. He held his head in his hands, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. The parents, the suffering, the sadness . . . It never got easier. Sasha kept reassuring him that his reactions were normal, that it meant he was still human, but sometimes he thought he couldn’t stand to see another death; he’d drunk so much grief working here; he’d breathed it, infused it in his pores . . . When would it be enough? he wondered. Would it ever be enough? He didn’t know.

  Shaking, he sat down on the edge of the bed and turned on the lamp. The light revealed a small and bare room. There was a bed, a dresser, a nightstand, not much else. Everything else he needed he used at the hospice: the kitchen, the laundry, the shower. Sasha teased him about it. She said he was either the eternal bachelor or a saint. But he liked the simplicity, needed it. The bareness in the trailer calmed him somehow. It made him feel like life was manageable, contained, not squirming out from underneath like it could do, like it had done once before.

  He took several slow, deep breaths, then opened the top drawer of the nightstand. With infinite care, he took out a small mirror with a brass stand, a plain linen cloth and a candle. He set them down, then stood, walked over to the window and opened it. Cold rushed in and quickly filled the room. He breathed deeply, feeling the cold on his face, holding it in his lungs, then he sat back down on the bed. He lit the candle, pausing as the flame flickered then steadied itself. Next, he stood the mirror upright on the stand, catching a glimpse of his own fingers, his own grizzled face with its silver stubble, its hollow cheeks and sad grey eyes in the glass, then slowly, deliberately, he covered the mirror with the cloth.

  There.

  He didn’t actually believe that souls could bounce back, that departing souls might mistake a mirror for a window and get trapped on Earth to spend the rest of eternity flapping around like a wounded bird. It was an arcane belief, medieval even, and yet the ritual calmed him; it made him feel neat, quiet inside. It helped him remember why he’d come here, why he’d stayed. He could still picture her down to the smallest line on her face. She had given him a gift. He would not forget it. He bent his head against his chest and whispered “Annika, Annika, Annika.”

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The clean, bright waiting room filled Annika Torrey with dread. Everything was different now. Everything had changed. Sometime in the past three years, she did not know when, Dr. Zagar’s once familiar waiting area had been renovated: the old oriental rugs replaced by a blonde parquet floor; the eclectic collection of armchairs she’d once found so cozy exchanged for molded rows of blue plastic seating. In the corner, there was a new children’s play area stocked with blocks and crayons and colouring books, while a rack on the wall showcased trendy magazines. The new décor was clean and modern; yet Annika sensed a dagger of blame in its brightness, like a long-lost friend who proclaims their joy at your return while the wrinkles round their eyes and their half-grown children in the hall whisper of time lost, of years gone by, of missed opportunities that can never be retrieved.

  She pressed her hands together in front of her and found that they were shaking. Her foot twitched on the floor. There were two others waiting also: a young, athletic-looking man in grey sweats, one long leg held straight out in front of him, his sweat pants bulking around a white cast that was visible at the foot; and an elderly woman bundled into a puffy, green parka, her tiny shriveled face trembling constantly as if the infirmity came from deep within her. Neither met Annika’s eyes.

  Even as she sat waiting, Annika could feel the strange hardness sitting like a stone inside her belly. It was not a pain, exactly, but a hardness, a stubborn knot in the v of her ribs that wouldn’t go away. For months, she’d convinced herself it was only a cramp until one awful morning, two weeks earlier, she’d looked in the mirror to find the person looking back was almost unrecognizable: a thin haggard waif with crispy hair, like a witch . . . Why didn’t I come sooner? she moaned inwardly, a fresh wave of anxiety swelling inside her. She did not want to think about why the doctor needed to speak with her in person. She did not want to think about what any of it might mean.

  Desperate for distraction, she studied the posters on the wall. There were three of them, all the same size, arranged neatly in a row: a picture of an elderly couple on bicycles, smiling and fit; a young man in a lamp lit room staring sadly into space; and the cross-section of a woman’s breast like a pink-volcano. Below the pictures were slogans in blue and teal and magenta lettering: Choices Homecare, Depression Hurts, Breast Health Awareness Starts With You. She closed her eyes.

  Before the renovation, there’d been a large framed print, a black and white drawing that used to hang where the posters were now, and she found herself wishing it was still there. It used to comfort her; she wasn’t sure why.

  The drawing had depicted a scene in a country home: a young woman lying on a bed amidst tangled sheets, her eyes closed; a man and woman, her parents one assumed, were looking on; the man standing, his wide rough features creased with worry; the woman seated in front of him on a plain hard chair; his hand resting on her shoulder, her face buried in her hands. In the foreground of this tableau, a well-dressed man with an intellectual air about him was seated at a table, his brow furrowed as he rubbed his beard in concentration? Frustration? It was difficult to say. Underneath the picture had been two words in simple black font: The Doctor.

  Years earlier, when Annika and her ex-husband Hamish used to come to Dr. Zagar’s office together, he’d said, “What an awful picture. What a terrible message to send,” and she’d kept silent, unable to admit her fascination with the drawing or the fact that she’d studied its every detail. Was the girl alive? Would the doctor save her? What was wrong with her? The tangled fabric, the dark shadows, the worry in the faces . . . It had made her own worries feel less strange, like they were part of some larger human drama, one that had been going on long before her and would go on long after. It had made her feel less alone. Still, she’d kept her opinions to herself. Hamish wouldn’t have understood. He’d have argued that darkness and grief were inappropriate to a ­doctor’s office; he’d have said that death was not a suitable ­preoccupation for someone in the hopeful stage of trying to conceive a baby, and then things would have broken down along their usual fault lines: Hamish the reasonable and Annika the crazy, not that it made any difference now.

  Hamish had moved on and the picture had been taken down.

  Suddenly, the door to the inner office swung open and a heavy-set man with a greying mustache and ball cap came out and began walking away, head down and shoulders hunched, his body curved inwards as if ushering away an awful secret.

  “Annika Torrey?”

  Annika looked up. The pretty, blonde secretary was standing in the doorway to the inner office, holding a clipboard, her face pleasant and inscrutable. Annika stood. “Right this way, please,” the secretary said. Annika followed her wordlessly through a door into an interior warren of doors and hallways that remained untouched by the renovations.

  The secretary opened the door to an examining room. “Have a seat. Dr. Zagar will be right with you,” she said, then she closed the door and Annika was alone.

  The room was Spartan. Bare. There was an examining table. An eyechart. A small window high on the wall that let in a pale white square of late October sun. Annika could hear a man’s voice rumbling through the wall but couldn’t make out what he was saying.

  When she’d gone to the cancer clinic for the tests, the technicians ke
pt leaving her alone like this in rooms. They’d been friendly and professional and tried to make her feel comfortable but then they’d leave, and she’d be alone, as if illness had already singled her out, had already marked her. In the white room with the tube she’d been able to see them through the window. Their voices had come over an intercom and told her what to do. There’d been a red light and a green light and even though she was used to being alone, seeing them there on the other side had filled her with terror and she’d had to fight the urge to spring up and pound against the glass for it felt like her aloneness, secret for so long, had finally taken on walls and locked her in.

  Now the door opened and Dr. Zagar came in, a severe little woman with short salt and pepper hair and wire-framed glasses. She sat on the stool with her legs spread wide, her grey trousers climbing up her skinny shins so there was a flash of bony white above the severe line of her black socks. She looked down at the chart, then at Annika, then down at the chart again.

  Annika held her breath.

  “The results came back from oncology and I wanted to discuss them with you in person,” the little doctor began. She took off her glasses and put them on the table. She looked Annika in the eyes.

  And Annika knew.

  Sound drained from the world. It bled slowly from the too bright little room until there was a strange blankness, a kind of vacuum of sound.

  “I’m afraid that the growth is in fact a cancer, and that it’s quite advanced.” The doctor’s voice came from far away. Annika heard it and did not hear it both at the same time. “It’s a stage four malignancy on top of the pancreas.”

  Annika blinked. The room seemed too bright, overexposed, every detail of it pierced through with awareness and heightened somehow: a cob web in the corner of the window, a crinkle in the paper on the examining table that lifted and fell in an unfelt draft, the wrinkles around the doctor’s eyes.