Exit Lines Read online

  And that’s how life changes. He doesn’t even get to look around, say goodbye, make a choice about coming or going.

  In the ambulance he does shit himself. “It’s all right, don’t worry,” says the woman attendant, but of course he worries, how could he not? Everything, everything gone to shit in a moment.

  It’s a while, though, before he gets close to comprehending how far everything has gone to shit. Immediately through the hospital doors he becomes meat: juggled and poked and intruded upon, lit here and there, faces, some friendly, some interested and concerned, others not, appearing and disappearing, voices talking too low or too fast or with too many words, gone before he can catch them. At some point Colette’s frantic face arrives over him, Bill’s beside her, so time must have passed, they have a long way to travel to bedsides back here, his own or her mother’s. Then Colette’s face and Bill’s are gone and he is hauled through more corridors and up an elevator, into another bed, and then wheeled out again and down an elevator and through a tunnel and he’s someplace else altogether, although still in the hospital. People ask questions, they have him do this and do that, raising his right arm, for instance, and failing to raise his left one. And all these days, weeks, maybe months, time is nothing. It is day or night, but it no longer extends the way it used to into time passing or getting somewhere.

  That, it appears, ends today. Time means something now. It means, according to the traitor Colette, that this room in this barely glimpsed place is his future and he’d better get used to it and even be glad for it, that’s what she’s saying.

  Every Sunday, his only day off from shoes, Colette sat on his lap while he read the Saturday comics to her, even the soap-opera ones that weren’t really for children. She was obedient, and not because she had to be scared of her parents either, like some kids. There may have been a few tough teenage years, but they were harder on Alice than him, due to his long hours at work, and other things. Later on, the day Colette graduated, she said, “I love you, Dad,” as he took her picture in her windblown black gown, her hand holding the stupid tasselled flat cap from flying away. Also “I love you, Dad” just before they set off down the aisle so he could give her away—give her away!—to Bill, who then had the nerve to take him at his word and actually take her away.

  “Blah blah blah,” he says now, glaring hard at the two of them, or intending to.

  “Please, Dad,” she says. “I know it’s difficult, but we’re doing our best.” No. If they were doing their best, they would fix him. They would find somebody to fix him. They would fold time and put him back as he was the night he went to bed with a little headache and woke up with a big one. “Be brave,” she says. So even Colette admits this isn’t all easy-peasy, nice as pie. Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, they used to sing about those, the two of them, when they were, maybe, out in the garden, those precious Sundays again, him weeding the vegetables and feeding her fresh peas in the pod—how did the song go? He’s got the first words but then it all falls away, does she remember?

  It didn’t used to make her look sad. It used to be a cheery tune, if you didn’t pay attention to the baked-alive birds themselves.

  Somewhere inside this person with her mother’s pink cheeks and narrow nose and wide, thin mouth, this person who makes a living doling out loans for a big bank, must be the happy, obedient blackbirds-in-a-pie girl; just as somewhere inside his own tilted body is the man who made sure she was clothed, fed and loved, who ran with her two-wheeler when she was first learning to ride, who held her up in the water when she was beginning to swim, who had encouraging words for whatever she wanted to try. Well, he foresaw trouble when Bill turned up, but Colette was not asking for encouragement then. George had given her so much of that, she mistook her desire to move far away for the best, right, only thing to do. Even now, even still exiled half the country away, she gives no sign of regretting choices of decades ago. Look at her, with Bill’s hand on her shoulder.

  So much love, it seems, has made her hard. Now it turns out her mind and heart are much larger than her father’s. It turns out she can very well decide not to clothe, feed, love, encourage or care for him in return. Are there debts, then? He shakes his head. At some point things always get muddled. He can’t get his brain to go very far.

  “Please, Dad,” Colette repeats. How old is she now? Fifty sounds about right—imagine that!—although he can’t be certain just how big a number it is. “Don’t cry.” He’s crying, is he? That happens unpredictably these days. Sometimes he doesn’t even notice till a tear falls into his lap. She probably thinks he’s unhappy. Depressed, as the social worker at the hospital said people often are after strokes, speaking airily, as if grief amounted to much the same thing as a sniffle or a cut finger. Anyway, he’s not depressed, he’s damned mad. It’s goddamned unfair, events that come out of the blue in the middle of the night, striking a man down on his own kitchen floor, leaving him in other people’s pitiless hands.

  Colette’s included, it seems.

  He cannot see a way out. Even when it came to closing the store, he made the decision himself, although pressured by malls and their big crushing chain stores—there were days when almost nobody came through his doors. But he thought the situation through, mentioning possibilities to Alice but not actually consulting her, and chose the closing date, and put the prices with his own hands on his remaining stock for his end-of-business sale, and even managed to be polite to old customers who showed up for the first time in ages to say how sorry they were to be losing a landmark downtown business, not to mention how they appreciated his suddenly cherished attentions to the demands of their growing or bunioned or flattened or high-arched or long-toed or otherwise hard-to-fit feet in years past.

  A little late for compliments and regret. As it’s late for Colette to be saying, “You’re always good at making the best of things. I know you’ll manage this too, once you’ve settled in. And I’ll be here to help”—how his heart leaps! “Bill has to fly home tonight, but I can stay on for a few days.”

  A few days. What about years?

  He cannot imagine even a week in this room, with outings to corridor and dining room and damned crafts room and coffee lounge. “And this is our library,” said the bloody woman showing them through, who runs the place and whose face rings some kind of faint bell, “with the fireplace and the big-screen TV. We picture it as a cosy alternative to the lounge for residents, especially in the evenings.”

  Here, people are residents, at least to their faces. At Alice’s nursing home, they’re called patients. Is this payback for Alice? But he had no choice, did he? When she did things like turn on the stove and forget, and often didn’t know where she was, and took to pummelling him with her weak little fists, and could barely begin much less finish a sentence—what could he do?

  Alice no longer knows her own name, never mind his. His situation could not be more distant from hers.

  Well, okay, it could be. But still.

  And okay, maybe it’s not fair to be mad at Colette, but who else is there?

  Funny how he sees snippets of life. He can’t tell if that’s different from before, but what comes to his head is not the smooth, lifelong unfolding of a movie, but snapshots, like the bike-riding lessons and swimming and pea pods. “Sweet,” he says, and Colette must understand something of the gentleness but not forgiveness that he intends, because although she does not look happy, exactly, she looks as if he’s partly restored in her eyes.

  But he’s still very angry. Why wouldn’t he be?

  “So,” Bill says, “do you like the couch where it is? We had to guess which cable outlet you’d want the TV hooked up to, so like I said, if you want things moved around, now’s the time. There’s three phones, one on the end table by the chair, another at your bedside and the other’s in the bathroom on the shelf by the sink. You can tell me where you’d like the pictures hung. If you do, of course. Maybe you don’t.” There’s that to be said for Bill: he offers this
small choice, he shows that much respect. It’s not that he and George haven’t gotten along, it’s that affections get shifted and loyalties change. George closes his eyes. He is so very tired of change.

  “Do you want to lie down for a while, Dad?” She’d like that, wouldn’t she? Then later she could say, “But I only left because you were sleeping, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “No. Push.” He waves his right arm. “Out.”

  “Into the hall and around again? Another tour?” Of course not, he means out altogether, what does she think? But Alice too pleaded for release in the early nursing home days, and it got her exactly nowhere and isn’t likely to get him anywhere either, not with Colette set firm against him, and his furniture already here.

  It was hard not to blame Alice for losing her mind. It seemed one of those things where, if a person put some effort into using it, she’d get to keep it; but maybe it wasn’t. Dr. Miller kept saying it was to do with tangles forming up in her brain like tree roots in a drain, but to George’s mind that’s what plumbers’ eels are for: to keep that sort of disastrous twining and knotting from getting too big and hard. “Do something,” he ordered in the early days of Alice losing her grip. “Get some interests.”

  “What?”

  “For Christ’s sake, I don’t know. You think of something.”

  He was impatient, sometimes probably cruel. He didn’t understand. Now he does, a little. Because it does seem that things can just happen and boom, there you are, struggling for words and other things, for a bit of freedom, some choice independently made. If Colette can’t feel the depths of that, well, he couldn’t either. Tit for tat. But then too, Colette, like Alice, is supposed to be a better, more, oh, outward-looking person than he. “Shit,” he shouts, just as loud and clear as he can, slamming his right fist on the arm of the wheelchair. “Shit. Goddamn.”

  “Shh, relax, Dad, we’re on our way.” The room whirls and he’s turned back to face the doorway so that he can see the side of the room he couldn’t see on the way in: the closet, the cupboards, nothing personal on display yet although Colette says, “Look, here’s the drawers where your sweaters and pyjamas and underwear are. I’ve hung up your trousers and shirts in the closet, and there’s space for bulk supplies of soaps and deodorants and so forth in these cupboards here. We’ll figure out what you’ll need, we’ll make lists.” Bulk supplies—so she can fly off with a clear conscience in a few days.

  “See the number on your door, the big 14 here? That’s how you’ll know this is your room when you’re coming back.” From meals. Games. TV movies. All the promised fun. “And isn’t this a nice touch?” There’s a plastic display box screwed to the wall beside his door. Beside everyone’s door. “It’s for any little personal item you’d like to put there, or a photo. So people get to know a little about you.” Let’s see, what would identify him to a passing-by stranger? Maybe a picture of himself as just another old shoe.

  He snorts. “Blah blah blah,” he says.

  “I wish you’d stop that, Dad. It’s really rude. And mean, too.”

  “Can’t,” he says, very slowly and carefully, “be good all the time.”

  “Well, you might try, even just for a few minutes.”

  There, that’s his Colette: crisp and sticking up for herself. He expects he taught her that. Alice sure wouldn’t have, unless by opposing example. The right side of his mouth curls up in a half-grin. “My girl.” And, mischievously, “Blah.”

  She laughs and slaps his good shoulder; so that’s all right.

  “Want to go back around? If we do a few circuits from different directions, you’ll get oriented for when you’re wheeling yourself.” When she is gone. Around and around he will go, all by himself, and where he lands, nobody will know.

  Besides the fact that he has to get used to a useless left side, which is a very complicated loss in itself, George’s vision makes him crazy. One eye cuts out at a fuzzy-edged limit, and is blurred and impossible anyway, while the other works as it always has, except harder. It gets tired, having to see pretty much everything all by itself, and a tired eye causes headaches, and headaches now lead to sizzles of panic.

  Or maybe the panic of the moment is due to the woman turning the corner at the end of the hall. She halts, she stands there at the intersection like some goddamn Amazon. George’s right eye blinks like mad but it’s still Greta, even camouflaged by a lot more saggings and baggings than she had long ago.

  How long?

  Whether Greta recognizes him at this distance or not, she’s quick on her feet, and within a blink or two she is gone. What if she lives here? What if she’s one of his many new neighbours, what if the room she dodged into is her own, which he’ll have to pass in order to get anywhere in this place?

  Then he is even more trapped than he dreamed. It’s enough to give a man a stroke, an anxious flare-up like this, and for a moment he has to close both his eyes, although not praying, exactly.

  5

  THE SAME ROOF AT LAST…

  IT’S ANOTHER BAFFLING VAGARY of George Hammond’s condition that old information—Greta’s name—can leap spontaneously to the tip of his mind, while he could bang his head flat trying to make some more necessary fact come to light. Timing is also an aggravation, since it’s not exactly helpful to remember a word at five o’clock that would have been useful at two.

  But possibly his alarm is misplaced; Greta’s memory may be even worse, although just to be here she must, like him, be more or less functioning. Not entirely needy. Which doesn’t mean she is whole. No one at the Idyll Inn is.

  Naturally, as Colette steers him by, he can’t see leftward into the room Greta entered. This place is pointless. Truly pointless: in terms of a journey here, there’s going around and around, or there’s going back and forth or, he guesses, there’s a brief elevator journey up and down, still unexplored. “Rat,” he says, unable to think of the word he really wants. Then he remembers. “Hamster,” he adds ungracefully, picturing futile wheels inside cages.

  “Sorry, Dad, I don’t understand.” Colette has turned right, aiming him through the tables and chairs of the dining room, quite an obstacle course. Many years ago, when George taught her to drive, he was careful to appear trusting and brave, but every muscle was tensed—whose wouldn’t be, with a teenager in control of so much metallic power and speed? “Always drive,” he told her, “as if everybody else is an idiot. Keep your eyes peeled, and your hands and feet ready.” Now she’s such a good driver that she can manoeuvre his chair at the same time as she checks out seating arrangements. “This is your table, Dad, think you can find your way to it okay? Never mind, we’ll practise, there’s plenty of time.” Till supper, she probably means. Or till she flies off.

  If she’s not going to say Greta’s name, he sure isn’t. He has no idea if it’s even familiar to her. If she ever knew of Greta, would Bill as well? Different times, different ways. They probably tell each other just about everything, except their own secrets if they have any. There was more restraint in George and Alice’s day. Well, maybe Alice told him everything, he wouldn’t know since he wasn’t necessarily listening. Now there’s no asking her what she might have kept to herself; just as he could tell her anything, everything, and she would never know.

  Odd, and funny, and a little bit sad, how things can turn around on themselves. “Don’t cry, Dad, we’ll keep going.” He was doing that again, was he? Pathetic.

  It’s not just lost words and leftward vision that frustrate, it’s a body that won’t let him whip around to check what’s behind him. There are people and eyes at his back. Anything could be happening. A man shouldn’t be so defenceless.

  And it’s true, Greta Bauer’s eyes are indeed at his back. She was able to step quickly (not scuttle, she would not do that—scuttle: a quick shuffling, a short swift run) into her room. Now she’s out again, peering into the dining room, where a full view of George is blocked by the woman behind him—can that be Colette?

/>   The not-so-alarming way to see this is that over an up-and-down lifetime, a person’s heart can become not just weakened but hard, so it may be a good sign that hers is still susceptible enough, and perhaps soft enough, to make that painful leap. Already she is nearly calm again; but it is good that the girls went back to their homes yesterday. It would not do for them to see her even briefly unsteady, or abruptly alert to a person who, with luck and care, is mainly a stranger to them. There was only that instant standing at the end of the hallway, seeing the skewed old man nevertheless perfectly recognizable under the bulk and sway of an old man’s body, when she thought, George. Oh. Just that, but no shock is good for a woman with a heart that has taken to manifesting its frailties in sharp ways that land her in hospital, and now have landed her here.

  Bäuerin, Dolph used to call her, laughing. Peasant, of the female variety, as well as a joke on their last name. He meant more than her strong, sturdy build; it was also a compliment to do with earthy pleasures. He was Bauer in those ways himself. The word means farmer as well as peasant, although sadly, Dolph was no farmer.

  Bäuerin: also someone who bears any weight of hardship when there is no choice.

  All three girls are big-boned like her, but in middle age remain tender-hearted. They tell her she has been a good mother. They say they are repaying her love and care with their own. They say they want her to be safe, and insist they are pleased each to pay some of the Idyll Inn rent. This is not always what happens to mothers, and Greta is grateful. They are good girls.

  They are also busy. Still, they have come back from their different long distances, first to hover over her in the hospital and then to make plans. Emily and Patricia, for example, found the Idyll Inn during a round of inspections over a couple of days. “Come see the place, Mum, it’s going to be really lovely,” said Patricia, and so it is. It is not the second-storey apartment with the creaking wooden floors and warm yellow kitchen and big drafty windows and tucked-away spaces useful for storing important papers such as years of photographs and report cards—the Idyll Inn is not any of that—but it is, yes, really lovely.