Viaticum Page 4

  “Ma’am?”

  “What if I drop dead and no one is around? How will any of them know I’m dead? No one comes to visit anymore.”

  “Well, do you have . . . a partner? A spouse, maybe? Someone that takes care of you? A neighbour that looks in on you, maybe?”

  There was more labored breathing and an awful quiet like a great dark country behind it. “I suppose they’ll hire a nurse. I suppose they’ll stick me in a home or something like that.” There was a long pause. “But what if I don’t want to name anyone? What if I want to just let them fight over it? It would serve some of them right.”

  As the words came through the phone, Annika felt them sink into the very core of her, hard and ugly yet familiar somehow, terrifyingly familiar. After she hung up, she sat looking out the gap at the greyness. She could feel the hardness, the lump at the top of her stomach, sitting inside her like a poison stone.

  “Ha! Caught you spacing!”

  Annika looked up to find her co-worker Beverly’s dark rimmed eyes peering overtop the partition. “Oh hi!” she recovered quickly. The sounds of the room came rushing in, the quick scurrying of fingers over keyboards like mice feet on the floorboards late at night. How long had she been sitting there? She didn’t know. “I was thinking, that’s all,” she said lamely.

  Beverly came around and leaned her narrow haunch against the side of the partition. She wore slim, black pants and a dark blouse, her hair slicked back in a high, tight bun like a ballet dancer’s. Beverly looked down and studied her own fingernails. They were painted a deep burgundy, almost black. “Ugh,” she said, “Al and I are fighting again. It’s really bad this time.”

  For reasons Annika couldn’t understand, Beverly had identified her as a confidante, coming around to her desk at break times to share stories about her tumultuous marriage. Annika was flattered, in a way, for she didn’t have many female friends. She made a point to keep track of Beverly’s stories, to ask questions that showed she’d been listening, yet suddenly she found her memory uncharacteristically blank. She had absolutely no recollection of what they’d talked about last. “What are you fighting about?” she tried.

  Beverly tossed her head then scanned the tops of the cubicles for gliding heads. “Come out with me,” she half-whispered. “You’re not doing anything. Come out with me for a smoke.”

  Annika got up and followed wordlessly. She didn’t know if she wanted to go or did not want to but felt she should. Beverly marched ahead with her black coat undone and her arms swinging.

  They took the fire exit out to the side of the building, then stationed themselves on the walkway in front of the wheel chair ramp, a concrete path that ran up between two planters, each holding a single row of manicured cedar shrubs that never seemed to get any bigger.

  Beverly leaned against one of the planters and took out a pack of cigarettes, cupping her thin manicured hands around the cherry as she lit it, then she snapped the cap back down on her lighter, flicking it quick like a switchblade, her wedding ring sparking in the grey afternoon. She narrowed her eyes at the parking lot. “He’s going to suffocate me,” she said. “He keeps harping on me about how irresponsible I am.” She brought the cigarette to her lips and sucked in, holding her breath for a moment before letting out a long, thin line of smoke.

  Annika propped herself up so she was sitting on the edge of the planter and let her hand wander among the cool, rough edges of the bark mulch. She liked Beverly even though she often didn’t know what to say. The younger woman reminded her of a colt with her flashing eyes and big dramatic gestures and long and restless legs.

  “He’s on my case about the smoking. And about the coffee, too. He says I need to get my priorities straight.” She let out another long stream of smoke. “He keeps telling me I’m selfish.”

  “It’s your choice, not his,” Annika offered. “And people do far, far worse things to each other than smoke and drink too much coffee.”

  Beverly moved closer so that her arm was touching Annika’s. “I told you that we’re trying though, right? That we went to this clinic?”

  “The clinic?” Why couldn’t she remember? It bothered her that she couldn’t remember.

  Beverly made her eyes wide. “The fertility clinic,” she said in a low, meaningful voice, her smoky breath warm on Annika’s face.

  “Oh. Oh yes. I remember now.” Yet Annika didn’t. She had no recollection of any earlier conversation about fertility or clinics. Of all things, she should remember that, she thought, with the disappointments and humiliations of her own experience still so fresh in her mind, not to mention the giant debt her and Hamish had incurred trying to make a baby. “How did it go? At the clinic?” she asked, trying for a brightness she didn’t feel.

  Beverly moved even closer and now Annika felt the other woman’s warm thigh pressed up against her own.

  “Well, it was weird. I can’t tell this to anyone else. Everyone tells me I’m being over-sensitive and that I should just accept it, that a certain amount of poking and prodding is necessary and worth it in the end. Al’s super excited about being a Dad; it’s all he talks about but I just . . . It really freaked me out to be honest. The clinic. I don’t even know that I want to go back there. It was kind of spa-like and science-y at the same time. Do you know what I mean?”

  Annika did know. She thought Beverly described it very well, that weird contrast that had unsettled her so deeply: soft music and hopeful serenity in one room, your feet up in stirrups and a hard light shining into the most secret parts of you in the next.

  Beverly’s hand touched her arm, light and unsure. Her wide, pretty eyes weren’t mean or flashing now but questioning, searching Annika’s face and Annika was aware that there was an invitation here for closeness, that an intimacy she’d once longed for and dreamed about was being offered, yet she felt trapped somehow by her own sense of strangeness, as if the secret of her illness was blocking any words of comfort she might offer.

  When Annika was young she used to imagine what it would be like to have female friends. On the farm there’d been only her and her brother and the neighbouring families, the Christian ones they were allowed to associate with, had only boys. Even at Church there’d been few girls Annika’s age and so she’d grown up fantasizing about the whispery, secret world of women. In high school, she’d sometimes catch the town girls clustered in the washroom, looking lithe and dangerous in their tight jeans and desert boots, whispering together with wide eyes and glossy lips, breathless as the secrets passed between them, then Annika would clomp in in her sturdy, sensible shoes and long rustling skirt and whatever it was, whatever magical fleeting thing that passed between them would suddenly stop and they’d turn and stare at her with mean, glittering eyes.

  Annika looked into Beverly’s hopeful face. “What was it like?” she asked, hating the stiffness in her own voice.

  Beverly held her cigarette out to the side. She tapped the ash onto the concrete with a burgundy nail. “Well,” she continued. “When I got there I thought it was going to be alright. The waiting room was nice. Zen-like. There were these leather seats and this giant picture of cherry blossoms on the wall and a fountain with those fish in it. What are they called? The Japanese ones?”

  “Koi. They’re called koi,” Annika heard herself say. She did not know how she knew they were called koi only that she did. Had Hamish told her? Someone at work? Her own words seemed to swim away, rippling between the curls of smoke that rose and melded together in front of her eyes. She shook her head. She felt sick, she realized suddenly. She didn’t feel well at all.

  “Koi,” Beverly repeated. “I always call them carp but I guess a carp is ugly. I guess a carp is grey. Anyway, there were these koi swimming around in there and these pale coloured stones on the bottom. Then the doctor came out and it got totally weird. First of all, she looked like a plastic surgery experiment gone seriously awry. Pretty, but
like a robot, you know? And then she starts talking about egg harvesting and injecting embryos in this bright, positive voice, staring at me the whole time with these big, earnest eyes and acting like the whole thing is totally normal. I mean, it was like walking into a creepy sci-fi movie. And I know that the smoking is bad for me, I just . . . I don’t even know what I want to do. Everyone’s like you’re in your thirties now, time to decide but I don’t actually know. I feel like I don’t know anything. Is that weird, to not know?”

  There was a pleading in Beverly’s voice that Annika recognized and she wanted to make it go away, she wanted to say the things she herself had once longed to hear. “If I can give you some advice, Beverly, I wouldn’t get too caught up in it,” she began slowly. “Things don’t always work out like you plan and it’s a whole lot of time and worry and expense that you’ll never get back. Hamish and I went to one of those clinics for a while and it didn’t work . . .” She trailed off as Beverly’s eyes grew wide and incredulous.

  “You and Hamish tried to have a baby? I didn’t know that.”

  Immediately, Annika regretted saying anything; she felt a wave of emotion building inside, rushing dangerously towards this one small disclosure, all her secrets and worries and loneliness scrambling over one another to be relieved. “Well, Hamish wanted to have kids,” she back tracked, trying to sound casual yet feeling her voice thicken with every word. “I was never quite as sure about any of it as he was. I felt the same as you, that I didn’t know. That life was day by day. I guess what I really wanted was for him . . .” she almost said ‘to love me’ but it was too late, the wave of emotion was coming; it was in her chest, now in her throat and she could not speak.

  She felt Beverly’s hand touch her back, unsurely, softly, the hand coming and going as if it didn’t quite know what to do. “Annika? Annika?”

  There was such a thing as too much loneliness, Annika knew. It was a physical need, just like hunger or thirst, equally powerful if denied long enough; beyond a certain threshold of loneliness, it no longer mattered what you thought or did not think; what you believed or did not believe; whether a person was worthy of your affection or deserving of your trust or wanted any of the same things in life at all, after a certain point there was simply the fact of your own loneliness, willing to do anything, to try anything, that it might be relieved.

  A sob escaped from Annika’s throat. She could feel the hardness at the top of her belly throbbing each time she breathed in. She gasped, desperate to get control of herself.

  “Annika?” Beverly’s voice came. “I’m so, so sorry. I wouldn’t have brought it up if I knew.”

  With a great effort, Annika straightened. The blood came rushing to her head. The world narrowed then widened again and she thought she might pass out but then the feeling passed. She took Beverly’s hand in her own and squeezed it. Beverly looked at her, surprised. “It’s nothing you said. I’m not upset about that,” she managed, smiling weakly. “Hamish and I . . . that’s old news now. I’m really just not feeling well. I think I must be coming down with the flu or something. Come on. Let’s go back inside.”

  Beverly helped Annika back to her desk where Annika sat for several hours trying to decide what to do. Before she left, she took a long look around, aware it was unlikely she’d be returning.

  It was already dark out when Annika drove home. She felt weak, hollowed out inside by her grief, by illness, by fear. She took the slower road along the water where she could see clusters of lights along the coastline: Port Orchard, Bremerton, Kingston, floating up from the blackness as if they’d become unanchored and were drifting away, the Western edge of the continent breaking up and drifting away like sea ice.

  It was strange, she thought, how the lights at night always reminded her of Rose Prairie. Seattle couldn’t be more different, she couldn’t have come further away from her childhood home without dropping into the sea, yet the lights at night always made her think of it, that tiny hamlet floating up from the darkened prairie when you crested the rise and took the long, straight country road to town.

  I could go back there, she thought.

  It surprised her. That she would even think it, even briefly after so many years away was foolish, preposterous even, yet as she drove she found herself imagining how it might be: the fields shifting in the Prairie wind, the cattle moving off under a wide arc of blue, the old house with its narrow doors and knocking footsteps and the plain white curtains full of light. What would they do? she wondered. What would her parents say if she were to show up now? They would be old now, old and wrinkled; perhaps they’d be softer, more forgiving . . . she shook her head. Unexpected tears blurred the lights as they floated up from the water.

  Eventually her route took her away from the water and into town where the buildings pressed closer and closer to one another and came forward to the curb, square and flat-faced and ugly. She turned onto Eddy St. and drove passed the pawn shops, the Good Hope Employment Centre, the South end Diner where all the old people went on Sundays. There was a woman on the sidewalk staggering in high-heeled shoes and an old man guarding the cherry of a cigarette in the entrance of the Eddy St. Tavern.

  She drove a little further then pulled into the small lot in front of her building where she sat in the darkened car a moment before getting out. Walking slowly in her too-tight work shoes, she crossed the pavement and let herself into the dim, brown foyer with all the names on a list outside the inner door, swiped her card, then climbed the stairs and walked down the narrow hall passed the other doors, the other lives she smelled and heard but did not know. At last, she let herself into her apartment.

  She didn’t even bother turn on the light, she simply lay down on the futon, still in her work clothes. She folded her hands across her chest and lay flat on her back, closing her eyes as she tried to shut out the murmur of voices and televisions that came through the walls, the groaning of the old pipes in the ceiling above her, the fact that it was only seven o’clock and there was another long, lonely evening ahead of her.

  She could feel the hardness in her belly plain as day now, a deadly lump in the V of her ribs. Each time she breathed in she felt the flow of her breath part around it, her living breath tracing its shape, a dark, blank place like a question inside, like Who? What? Where? Insisting on an answer.

  She did not know what to do. The mere idea of the hospital, of being poked and prodded again, of being stuck in that dead airless space with doctors and nurses who knew nothing of her, filled her with dread and the thought of dying here, of simply letting time run out in this ugly apartment was no better. That her life might actually end here, in this waiting place, in this wet and dreary city she’d intended to leave behind, seemed too awful, too unfair to even contemplate.

  Again, she found herself thinking of her childhood home. She thought about the wideness of the landscape and the smell of the Earth and the deep, deep quiet at night and the stars . . . And again, she stopped herself, an image of her father coming into her mind: her father, who, upon seeing her strong and fit and healthy, upon seeing her happy and independent for the first time in her life, had turned his head away in disappointment.

  It still staggered her, each time she thought about her parents: that they could be so rigid, that their love could end over something as seemingly meaningless as a summer job, that an impulse decision made by a lonely teenaged girl could cause a lifetime of estrangement.

  But that was how it was. That was how they were and she had stepped outside their love in a way she hadn’t understood; what to her had been a job, a chance to meet other kids her age, was to them a rebuke, an insult to everything they’d ever stood for: their otherwise obedient daughter taking off to work like a man, in a man’s world, at a man’s job, living in co-ed dorms, staying in hotels on her nights off . . . Yes, she’d gone and embraced the very thing they’d pitted themselves against their whole lives; she understood this now; and ye
t, the crazy thing was, at the time, she hadn’t felt like a rebel, just lonely, just ­excited.

  When the forest service recruiter at her high school job fair had told her that he liked to hire farm kids because they worked hard, her heart had leapt with excitement. She’d filled out the application on the spot. Growing up, she used to see the firefighters outside the coin laundry on their days off and they’d always seemed magical to her, these groups of tanned young people standing outside the white crew vans, laughing together in such a free and easy way. There’d been women too, girls not much older than herself, that used to sit on the curb in the sunshine, all in a row, talking to one another as they waited for their clothes to dry. They’d looked so close to one another, almost like sisters. Sometimes they’d catch her watching them and smile and she’d smile back, a shy little Christian girl twisting in her sturdy shoes on the hot pavement.

  Yes, she’d known her parents would be angry when the Forest service man called to tell her she’d got the job, yet she’d never imagined they would actually disown her. Oh, the fights it had caused! They’d even sent her older brother, Jonathan, to fetch her during training and she’d had to refuse him in front of everyone. She could still remember her sinking dread as he’d come across the lot, his glaring white shirt cutting straight across the dusty training ground, the sudden silence as the other recruits stopped to watch, then his face in her face all twisted up with righteous fire when she’d refused him. “You’ve made your choice, Annika,” he’d hissed into her ear, “Don’t think you can come crawling back when it all falls apart. I can see you’ve made your choice.”

  And now she was here.

  She lay awake for a long time going over these things in her mind. The choices. The consequences. The genes and the seeds. She was no closer to an answer. Finally, she fell into a fitful sleep, her dreams punctuated by the entrances and exits of all the people in her life, its many stages, a strange trajectory of places and jobs and ways of being. It was in this state of half-dreaming that an idea suddenly came to her.