That woman on McKay ruled over her world in an automated La-Z-Boy throne. The chair could motor itself up and down and it was surrounded by four or five little tray tables that held everything she needed. There was a system to it, a spot for the remote controls and the telephone, and an area for lots of different boxes of Kleenex and a special corner for her purse and for those flip-top plastic tubes that keep all the pills for the week in separate little SUN, MON and TUE boxes. She had a place for her knitting stuff and one for the address books and the crossword puzzles and the Bible and another one for photographs. Even though she had cataracts and her sight was clouding over and her glasses were just for show, there was nothing she couldn’t find. She kept her hair pulled back in a tight bun and though she never went outside, she wore real shoes instead of socks or slippers.
“I wonder could you do something for me?”
She asked me this once, during one of those 38 degree summer days where everything gets heavier than it should be. I was sweating from the bike and my shirt was damp and sticking to me. The smell in the room was thicker than normal. You could almost see it.
“Yeah,” I said automatically. “No problem. What do you need?”
I pictured something like a bag of groceries that needed to be unloaded or a letter she wanted me to drop in the box.
“Will you look at this?” she said. “And tell me what you think I should do?”
Before I could get a hold on what was happening, she started to unbutton her blouse and to wriggle out of her sleeve and slide away the sturdy beige strap of her bra.
“Oh, no,” I said, “Don’t do that.”
I turned in the opposite direction, toward the TV, but it didn’t change anything.
“This isn’t right at all,” she repeated, “not at all.”
It was like I was barely there and she was just looking herself over and privately keeping track of the changes in her body.
“You see how it’s getting worse, don’t you?” she said. “What do you think I should do? You work for the doctor’s, don’t you? What do you think?”
She’d pulled back her shirt far enough that I could see nearly her entire breast. It was a thin, used-up looking thing and almost the same white colour you’d link up with one of those ugly fish that live in some deep trench at the bottom of the ocean and have never seen light. The skin was crisscrossed with a purplish-blue network of veins and there were long, very long, black bristles growing around the nipple. Just below, you could see the problem — a big yellowish cyst, like the biggest pimple you can imagine, but circled in a dark red sore colour. It looked very bad, almost ready to burst and there was a shiny liquid film oozing out of it. The woman looped her index finger around the red circle and grazed over the surface in a tentative, worried kind of way.
“It hurts every time I move,” she said. “Even when I’m just sitting in my chair. I thought it was nothing at first, but it’s getting bigger every day and I can hardly stand it now.”
It was the first time I’d ever seen one of those hidden parts of a woman’s body — Barney’s pictures didn’t count for anything — and I didn’t know what to do. I felt kind of dull and numb, like this was something I should have seen coming, but still couldn’t prepare for. It was like when you get called up to the front of the class and they ask you to stare down the jumble of numbers and letters in a difficult math problem, but even before you stand up to go to the blackboard, you already know you can’t do it, that this question is out there, beyond where you can go, and it’s going to have to stay unsolved.
“I don’t know,” I said to her. “You need to see a real doctor. You need to get somebody to take you to the hospital and get looked at by somebody who knows what they’re doing.”
I told her I was sorry, and that all I could do was maybe check-in with the pharmacist when I got back to the store and that maybe if I described it to Musgrave and told him what it looked like, he might know what to do and maybe he would call her later on.
“Well that would be just great,” she said, happier than she should have been.
“That would be wonderful, thanks so much.”
“But it’s the doctor you really need to see,” I said. “You can’t forget about that. You need somebody to take you to the doctor, right, as soon as you can?”
“Oh yes, yes, dear,” she said. “I’m sure somebody will come along. No problem at all. Your Mr. Musgrave is going to call. He’ll call and tell us what to do next.”
Then she pulled her shirt closed and straightened herself up and slipped the buttons back together. It was all very matter of fact. A second later, she was thanking me again for all my help and telling me to grab a few cookies out of the cupboard on the way out.
“There might be a cold pop in the fridge,” she said in a mischievous funny kind of way and that was that. One thing gave way to the next.
I worked my last day for Musgrave near the end of October, just after they turned the clocks back and everybody was still trying to adjust to the full dark coming down on them by five in the afternoon. The temperature dropped fifteen degrees in one night and there was a minefield of black ice on the side of the road. I zig-zagged across the city trying to avoid it and my eyes never moved from that spot a couple feet in front of the wheel. I’d been making my preparations for winter for the last few weeks and the fingertips were already cut out of my gloves and I was dressed in layers. All through September, it had been wet and rainy and my back tire had been kicking up a brown line of spray. Every coat I owned had this skunk-stripe of filth running down from my neck to the base of my spine.
When I made the turn to Barney’s, the sky was still a little bit grey with leftover light. He was getting his standard package of canned goods and insulin and the little strips he used to test his sugar levels. There was a refill for his blood pressure medication and a roll of paper towels and a package of disposable razors. He’d already made his move off the porch and into the TV room where he normally sat with the remote in his hand and his legs spread wide over the velour cushions. I went up the stairs and knocked on the door and I called out to him, telling him that his stuff was here and that he better come and get it.
There was no sound from inside and I think that was the first sign I had that things were going to change. Barney was never not at home. I rang again and I rattled the front door a bit and I told him I’d just leave the package on the porch if he didn’t want to pick it up. His inside door, the real wooden door, was wide open and there was nothing to keep me from just poking my head in and looking around, but I had those lines in my head and I stuck to the rules. I went over to the big front window and cupped my hands up against the side of my head and stared through the glass like a kid at an aquarium.
I saw Barney on the other side. He was still wearing his nylon shorts and his Hawaiian shirt, but he was down on the floor now, piled up in a fleshy lump and surrounded by newspapers and old magazines and take-out food wrappers. One of his arms was bent back at an angle that didn’t seem right and his head was turned away from me so I couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. There was a bowl of Ravioli turned over near his head and the grainy red meat sauce was seeping into the carpet. It looked like all the hard stuff, all the bone and the muscle, had been sucked out of his body. The Medic Alert necklace was resting on the coffee table where he must have put it before he started eating and the steady red light kept blinking on and off like nothing was wrong.
My first thought was just to leave him there. I had my nose pushed up against the glass and I was only a foot away, but I couldn’t shake this feeling in my stomach that this was how Barney did it. This was his master trick, his secret way of getting kids into his house.