Rosemary’s orange lipstick was a running joke among Cindy, Malcolm, and Mitch.
“Well, that would be nice, dear,” Rosemary said. “I’m having such a hard time finding my shade. I believe that they’ve stopped making it. Last time I went to Cumberland’s, the girl there said they hadn’t seen it for months.”
So the conversation moved on, and Grace recovered. She always did, and never gave up. Her persistence, in the end, was what won Mitch’s mother over — that, and the first Christmas they all spent together. Grace had been quiet for most of the day, and Mitch could tell she was nervous. She was stepping back, listening, trying to figure out how to slip into this already-formed family without disturbing its contours. They opened presents together on Christmas morning, after a breakfast of pancakes. When Rosemary opened her gift from Grace, she was silent for a long time. Mitch braced himself, wondering what was wrong. Then he saw, to his horror, that she was crying, his mother who hardly ever cried.
He stared at Grace, who didn’t notice his concern. She was looking at Rosemary, waiting.
It was a box of orange lipsticks. She must have gone to every drug store in Montreal, buying up their entire supply of Rosemary’s favorite shade. There was enough ugly lipstick in that box to last a lifetime.
His mother said, “This might be the nicest thing I’ve ever seen.”
As she got older, Rosemary grew freer with her tears. She cried at Mitch and Grace’s wedding; she cried when her grandchildren were born; and she cried, well and truly sobbed, when Mitch had to tell her that he and Grace were getting divorced.
“Now you’ll never have a family,” she managed to say.
For a fleeting instant, and for the first time in his life, he hated her. How could she say something so awful to someone who already felt like a failure? And what was she talking about? He was still young, and maybe he’d remarry; if he wanted a family, he could still have one.
But she was right, of course. He never did.
Five years after his divorce, Rosemary was diagnosed with stomach cancer.
“I always thought it would be my lungs,” she said with typical dryness. “Now I’m glad I never gave up smoking.”
It was winter, and Mitch had driven her to the hospital. They were sitting now in his parked car, and he breathed in her familiar smell of cigarettes and Jean Naté perfume.
“I don’t know about that,” he said.
They had been given a timeline, and it was short. Malcolm was flying in from Mississauga. Cindy and the kids would come later, by car, for one last visit. They had discussed all this calmly in the lounge over coffee, his mother orchestrating the next few months, knowing exactly what had to be done. Her knack for organization was outrageous. She should, he thought, be put in charge of the world.
At the time Mitch had a girlfriend named Mira, a nurse he’d met at work. Short and jolly, she cooked delicious Indian meals she had learned from her mother, and supported him through Rosemary’s entire illness. She came along to the hospital whenever he wanted her to and stayed home when he didn’t. She met Malcolm and Cindy but didn’t try to ingratiate herself with them. At night, when he cried, she held him.
Within weeks it was close to the end. Malcolm had taken a leave from work and was staying in their mother’s house, and Mitch often spent the night there too, the two of them staying up late drinking whiskey, sitting there silently with nothing much to say but unable to leave the comfort of each other’s company. On one of the last nights, Malcolm asked him about Mira.
“I’m not sure,” Mitch said. “She’s been great about all this, that’s for sure.”
“It would make Mom happy,” Malcolm said. “She always worries about you being alone so much.”
Mitch remembered. Now you’ll never have a family. And he began to think about a time in the future when maybe he could begin to pay Mira back, offer her some of the same comfort she’d given him throughout this ordeal.
The following afternoon, he brought Mira to the hospital. She hadn’t seen his mother in a couple of weeks, and by now Rosemary was breathing heavily, her thin cheeks laboring, her eyes fluttering. But she looked up at Mira and smiled.
“Oh, Gracie,” she said. “I knew you’d be back.”
Mira patted her hand, unfazed. A nurse, she of course didn’t need his explanation about how the drugs were shuttling his mother back and forth through time, how sometimes she thought he was five years old and asked him what he’d like for breakfast. But something changed between them in that moment, and after his mother died they stopped spending every night together, gradually disentangling, and finally Mira met someone else and moved to Ottawa.
Long after his mother’s death, he thought about her remark. It was one of many moments in which he realized, not with shock but nonetheless with horror, how much his private pain, the decision to divorce, had stubbornly refused to remain confined to his own life. It made him feel more guilty than ever.
But gradually he began to change his mind about what she’d said. Rosemary had been capable, doting, self-sacrificing, but also bossy and desirous of control. She had made up her mind to love Grace, and the divorce made her angry because she had to undo that relationship, and not of her own choosing. She didn’t let go of things easily. Or people. He remembered something she’d said about his father when they finally discussed the suicide. “He wouldn’t let me in,” she said, “and I refused to stay out.”
Even in her last days, as her body withered and her confusion grew, she didn’t fabricate events that hadn’t happened or see people who weren’t there. Calling Mira by Grace’s name was the only time she got something like that wrong. Maybe it was intentional, a way of reminding him of what she’d said after the divorce, less a moment of sorrow than a curse. You will never have a family.
He understood, finally, that he would never know how to interpret her remark, because the only person he could have asked to clear it up was gone.
He missed her still, not all the time but with occasional pangs of clarity so intense they made him dizzy. He felt that now. He would have liked to tell her he’d seen Grace again, that he was trying to help her. He would have liked to present this to his mother not as a trophy or a prize but as a scar, something tough but healed, ridged with the passage of time. Because if anyone understood what it meant to lose and go on, it was her.
Or maybe it was as simple as this. He would have liked to hear that voice from his childhood, from his slow-burn mornings, the voice of orange lipstick and Craven A cigarettes, speak again; to hear her say, “Oh, Gracie. I knew you’d be back.”
SEVEN
Montreal, 1996
GRACE WASN’T USED TO having a patient’s parents threaten her, and she couldn’t stop thinking about what Annie Hardwick’s father had said. You shouldn’t be allowed to muck around in people’s lives. She hadn’t been mucking around; she had only listened to the girl and offered her the best advice she could — which, after all, was the service these people were paying her for. She carried on this argument with Mr. Hardwick inside her head, because he wasn’t there to listen. He did leave a brief message on her office voice mail at ten o’clock one evening, sounding like he’d been drinking. “You’ll be hearing from our lawyer,” he’d said.
But she hadn’t heard anything at all, from any lawyer or even from Annie, who had missed three appointments in a row.