Every act of kindness I ever experienced came at her hands. She never hurt me because she never found a soft spot. But she took me in. I called her mother.
I pull the pillow from beneath her head. I settle it over her face. Apply pressure. Her startled slurs are muffled by the stuffing. Her hand rises, trembling, to touch my elbow. Then it is all thrashing. Grunting. Growling. One dead leg slips off the mattress. I slide myself on top to straddle her. Her big breasts bunch under my groin. Her nails tear grooves in my forearms. Her chest deflates between my thighs. I withdraw the pillow. The muscles of her face have come unglued. I see the silver fillings in her molars. She has wet herself. That almond-y smell. Thin rasps exit her throat. I snap the oxygen mask back over her face.
I find some Q-Tips in a bathroom drawer. Sit back with Mama. I take each finger very gently. I remove my skin cells where they have collected under each fingernail bed.
Patience Nanavatti has been sleeping at my apartment. She is packed when I arrive. Grocery bags filled with Sally Anne clothing. Enough, she believes, to make a clean start.
“You’re sweating,” she says. “There’s blood on you.”
A blistering ache sets up in my arms, my shoulders. Lactic acid burn. Chloride torching the muscle fibres. Matilda noses between my legs.
“Lie down, Jeff.”
“I am alright.”
“Lie down.”
“I will.”
I lie on the bed she has occupied previous nights. I have slept on the couch. The scent of her is in the sheets. It is not a bad smell at all. Patience Nanavatti pulls off her sweater. Blue static sparks pop along her torso.
I do it out of LOVE. Mama used to say this. “If I am brusque or insensitive it is because we are familiar and I LOVE you.” How much behaviour can you hide under the cover of LOVE? Allowances made to trample others because — because what? Because LOVE? Because you LOVE someone?
Patience Nanavatti lies beside me. We do not touch.
“I could take the dog,” she says. “You, too.”
To leave this town permanently — I do not know it is FEAR I feel, simply because I do not know the colour that emotion bleeds. There is a brittle cracking sensation, localized to my chest, through which burst wires that wriggle as earthworms do. To vacate these streets, these sights of long acquaintance…
As Cappy Lonnigan says: Yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s the mystery.
“You must understand, Patience Nanavatti. I do not need you.”
“That’s fine, Jeff. I don’t need you, either.”
EPILOGUE
Summertime and squirrels abound on Sarah Court. The descendants of Alvin and Gadzooks! nest in trees whose outlines stand in calligraphic relief against the sky.
Nicholas Saberhagen’s car rounds the bend where Clara Russell’s house still stands. He pulls up in front of Fletcher Burger’s house. Burger himself is long gone—disseminated is more apt — but the house is currently occupied by his ex-wife and daughter.
Nicholas’s knock is answered by Abigail. Who is lovely in a violet sun dress. The scar on her throat is white, while the rest is tanned. She extends her hand to Nick, who receives it in a brotherly manner. They do not speak. Abby seldom does anymore.
They cross to the house where Nick grew up. His mother lives there now that her ex-husband is gone. Released on bail after his malpractice hearing, Frank Saberhagen booked clandestine passage to Brazil on a ship borne down the Saint Lawrence seaway. He was bitten by a stowaway spider. Its neurotoxin induced seizures and severe priapism. Frank Saberhagen thrashed to death in an airless metal cabin on a banana freighter in the dead calm of the Atlantic ocean. His limbs flexed hard as bowstrings. Teeth clenched so tight his molars impacted. He also happened to perish sporting a trouser-ripping erection.
Though I give the impression of omniscience, it is not so. Whether Frank is dead or alive in fortuitous or inhospitable circumstances is really up to you. Stiff as a rod in a Brazilian banana boat? Fine. Should you wish to picture him in more charitable circumstances, well, everything is within the realm of speculation.
Dylan Saberhagen runs out to greet his father and Abby. Had it been me guiding this narrative, I suppose I would have let him die at the Motor Motel. Please try not to hold this inclination towards the most horrid variable against me. How svelte the boy is! Brain damage altered the appetite suppression centre in Dylan’s brain. As has been said: the brain is a funny organ and it breaks in funny ways.
Nick’s car wends up Martindale past the pond where Dylan caught poison ivy years ago. Nick unrolls his window to let air flow through his spread fingers. Wind skates up Abigail’s legs to stir the hem of her dress. Nick’s gaze momentarily wanders to that bare strip of thigh — a sight that once would have locked a thrilling tension across his chest — but now he only lays a hand on the armrest as the fabric touches his fingertips to resettle.
The Lion’s Club carnival is on in Port Dalhousie. The heavenly smell of fried dough, or at least I’ve heard it described as such. The beach is studded with Tilt-A-Whirl, Zipper, bumper cars. All manned by a leathery roustabout. A pavilion christened “Our Poisoned Seas” is erected beside the marina. An oilcoated shark floats in a glass box of formaldehyde. Its black eyes stare over Lake Ontario.
An Educational Initiative Made Possible by Mister Conway Finnegan and Wal-Mart, reads the plaque beneath the shark.
The lake shore is teeming with residents awaiting the fireworks. A ferry crosses the lake, its windows bright as Kuggerand gold as if ferrying the sun itself.
Nicholas spots Wesley Hill and his son. They greet each other with great warmth. Colin has caught something he wants to show everyone. A lunar moth batters the cage of his spread fingers.
“You mustn’t do that,” Wesley tells his son, as he’d told him years ago. “Moths have a protective powder on their wings. If it comes off, it’s like… well, you without your skin.”
Colin opens his hands. The moth floats up into the night.
“Did I kill it?”
“He’ll be okay,” Dylan tells him. But everyone knows the moth will die.
You are all in this together. That huge thrashing teardrop of life. Consider the story threads. Where they start and end. A young pyromaniac enthralled by fireworks ends with fresh eyes in a woman’s sockets. A car thief telling an odd boy how to hutwhirr a vayheckle ends with an equally odd boy hanging himself in a motel closet — only to be saved by that first odd boy, now a man, who once stole a Cadillac belonging to the other boy’s grandfather.
Some say the only way to break such chains is to leave the place they’ve been forged. Yet every town is essentially a box with an open top, isn’t it? If you do not make the choice to step out of the box, well, can you really call it a trap?
Further downshore stands my benefactor, Jeffrey, with Patience Nanavatti. They should not be here, as they could be spotted — indeed, Danny Mulligan stands not far away with his daughter Cassie upon his shoulders — but Patience’s father will be honoured with a fireworks fusillade tonight. Between them sits a bitch with a livid scar on her flank.
At the merry-go-round congregate the residents of Tufford Manor. Clive hands out blankets to his thin-blooded charges. William Lonnigan wipes away a runner of gossamer-thin drool descending from Clara Russell’s bottom lip. She’s by far the most docile tenant at Tufford Manor. Clara Russell causes absolutely no fuss at all. After all, she is alive in the sense a ficus plant can be considered alive.