The day Chuck died, Ben asked her to come to the hospital to bring home Chuck’s things: scarves and table cloths that Joy used to cover every light and every surface, sweaters tenderised by time and wear, a book of Far Side comics, a copy of Gitanjali, mugs. But the nurses were off schedule and when Louise got there, Chuck’s body was still there. It was plainly inappropriate for her to be in the room, so she went to the visitors’ lounge. But something in Louise was twisting. A parade of distant relatives had come through in the past week to cry for Chuck and his family. But there was nothing tragic about dying at sixty-five, in a palliative care ward with prize-winning decor and free ice cream and special chairs for visitors, swaddled in love. That was just nature. What happened to Joanne was not. Louise left the visitors’ lounge and walked in the corridor until she had a view into Chuck’s room, and she continued to feel enraged until she saw the nurses tie Chuck’s hands and feet together before they put him in the body bag. Something about that upset her severely; either the fact that he was tied up or the fact he had no idea he was tied up. She cried but she held her breath so no one would hear her. She went back into the visitors’ lounge and faced away from the room, towards the blizzard exploding in white powder against the windows.
With a stern step Louise gets one foot down on the ice, then quickly brings the other to join in. As soon as she steps down, it’s like there’s cotton wool in her ears. The snow on ice absorbs the sounds of everything around her: the philosophy students on the bench talking Hegel, the mothers cajoling their resistant children, the squirrels who opted against hibernation, jibbering in the snow. A memory comes to her like it’s been conducted through the ice. Her five-year-old ankles in her skates were ugly and turned in, the opposite of Joanne’s perfect ankles. You just need to tighten your laces, Joanne said, and Louise wanted Joanne to do it.
Stupidness, nonsense. Louise keeps moving her stiff feet, one two, away from the memory, closer and closer to where Ben stands with Joy and Sammy and Winston. The coated ice muffles her footfalls and they can’t hear her approach, even when she is right behind them. But she can hear what they are saying, their voices strangely filtered by the wind.
“No no,” Sammy is saying. “Of course she’s nice. Just … odd.”
“Be more specific,” Ben says.
“Well last night—you told me she doesn’t have any siblings? But last night she told me that she had a sister, a sister who died. I think she was trying to make me feel better … but is she, like, does she tell stories about her life that aren’t true?”
If Louise tells people about Joanne, she loses control. She will not be able to control when other people speak of Joanne, and they will speak of her without warning, thoughtless, profane.
Sammy laughs. Something bursts out of Louise and she is powerless to stop it. Her arms shoot up in front of her, and she grabs the back of Sammy’s jacket, and shoves as violently as she can.
But Sammy has Olympic reflexes. She jerks hard to the side and Louise watches as her own arms go wide, she has too much momentum to stop, and now she is flailing forward, desperately trying to twist away from the ground, the ice one long stretch of colourlessness.
She can’t see anything but the blank of the sky. For a moment, she’s the only person in the world. And then the throbbing in her side and her ankle bring her back.
Louise puts both hands over her face. Someone tugs gently at her elbows. The tugging becomes more and more insistent but Louise rolls away from it, powdering herself in snow.
She crawls to her feet. They are lined up in a row, staring at her with their matching cheeks and warm faces, with the exact same look of hurt confusion that asks, how could anyone possibly behave so badly, how could there possibly be any excuse?
Louise shouts at them. She screams.
“There should be a city by-law! There should be a law! How can they let people walk on the ice? It’s just so incredibly, irresponsibly unsafe!”
She makes for the bank.
Louise hears Ben calling her name but she doesn’t turn back. When she reaches the knoll she’d like to keep going, but the pain in her ankle is intense and she collapses. Her phone buzzes again. She pulls it out of her pocket and throws it in the snow. She drags herself up onto the bank and sits in the muck. She picks up the phone and puts it back in her pocket. She gets to her feet. Her gait is demented and she stumbles off the path and starts to walk the perimeter of the pond, inside the bald shrubbery, hiding from view like a child. Snow splatters on the non-waterproof uppers of her boots. She has a five in her pocket. She could get the streetcar home. She left her funeral clothes and some make-up at Ben’s but she will just have to forfeit them. Her butt is all wet and when she finally gets to where the pond meets the highway, she can’t decide if she should get on the streetcar or wait until her pants dry. She doesn’t know if her seat will dry in this weather. Are clothes slower to dry in humid or dry air? She just stands there, making sure to stay concealed by the rim of bushes, watching the cars go by, trying to think what to do. She shudders from cold.
Joanne will always be dead. Nothing is changed by Louise thinking about her. Thought fragments break through anyway. Against her will they struggle to trace just how Joanne’s body gave up. They never come in response to cues Louise can predict and steel herself for—like an Erykah Badu song or a TV show Joanne liked. Instead they come when she’s on a phone conference at work explaining best practices; when she’s trying to navigate a cranky rush-hour intersection on a bike. Yesterday, in the awful basement crematorium of a big church on Parliament Street, Ben’s family, his family friends, his family friends’ cousins, and Louise crushed together and waited for Joy to flip the incinerator switch. It was supposed to have been just Ben, Joy and Sammy, but no one was up to the uncomfortable task of turning the rabble away. The room was a cacophony of tiny sounds, throat clearing, nose-blowing, wiping tears on sleeves. Louise stood behind a pillar and tried to focus on the floor tiles. But instead her mind went to a Joanne she had tried to forget. She pictured Joanne alone in her horrible apartment with yellowed stucco and the dirty carpet, knowing she was dying and that she’d never have children, knowing she was dying and it wasn’t a sunny day, knowing she was dying and she couldn’t reach the phone. Louise’s mother has put away all the photos of Joanne, save for one: Joanne is a baby with a bow taped to her sparse hair, full of gummy joy, before everything.
Louise hears Ben say her name. She can make him out, twenty feet away, only slivers of his back through the snarl of branches. She has to stare for a moment to be sure it’s really him. Louise, she hears him say. He says it a second time, not like a curse but like a question. She imagines herself bursting out of the bushes, her hair wild with twigs, big enough to speak.
The Saturday that Ben undid her buttons, they met for lunch at a pho restaurant, and he’d had to take his glasses off to eat his noodles so the steam didn’t fog up his vision. There was something intimate about his face without them, and she’d had to work not to reach for his cheek. After the server took their plates, Ben removed the bottles of sauce and seasoning from the middle of the table one by one, lining them up against the edge. She worried this meant he was the compulsive type, but then he reached across the space he’d made, and took her hands in his.
He is such a nice man, and all she has done is sap his grief. He recedes through the park.
She watches him go.