Good To A Fault Part 29

"Oh yes?"

"Lorraine's children were staying with me while she was in hospital, and I-"

"You're her mother-in-law?"

"What?"

"The kids were with her mother-in-law."

"No, I had-Yes, they were. They were all with me. Staying in my house. Or at least-while she was in treatment."

"So what can I do for you, Ms. Purdy?"

"They've gone, they've moved out." What could she say? She sounded insane. She adjusted, tried not to let uneven breath crack her voice. "I have-some of the baby's things here, and some schoolwork for the children, but I've misplaced the address of their new place."

Bertrice did not answer right away.

"I wanted to send them on, you see, to give the children-I need to be able to get these things to them."

"You sound a little upset," Bertrice said.

"Clayton brought back my car," Clary said, and then stopped talking.

There was a long pause.

"I'm worried," Clary said.

"I can hear that."

"I'm afraid of what will happen to them," Clary began, but she could not bring herself to say anything more. Partly because it was not fair, and she knew it. More, at this moment, because if she said anything hulking sobs would come up into her throat and drown her. She was a lunatic, she should not be doing this. She wanted- "Ms. Purdy?"

Bertrice must get a lot of calls from lunatics.

"How about you give me your number, Ms. Purdy, and then if Lorraine needs to get in touch with you, I can give it to her."

Clary was afraid she was going to scream. Her hand was shaking on the receiver. She let it fall down in its cradle.

The hospital knew her. The oldest nurse, Debbie, was on duty, and that was a stroke of luck.

"She did, she-where did we stick that?" Debbie flipped taped papers and stickies up and down behind the nursing station counter. "She left a number for Darwin, because he was going to call, and I think he did, but did we-hmmm. That's the question."

Clary leaned as far as she could, to help look.

"There! I knew n.o.body would have torn it down. It's always me who cleans this place out. Huh! I thought it was a phone number, but it's just this."

Debbie handed her a yellow sticky, with Darwin's name and an address on 38th Street.

"Thank you," Clary said. "You have all been so kind, all the way through this."

"Well, look who's talking. I don't think she'd have done it without you and that brother of hers pulling her through. You take care," Debbie said. She put her warm, plump hand on Clary's arm, and Clary felt like she'd been branded. She accepted the mark.

"Oh, and we found these, too," Debbie said, handing her a manila envelope.

Clary's shoes made a loud noise on the floor, walking away. The elevator was too slow; she ran clack-clack down the stairs. Backing out of her parking stall she nearly hit an elderly man, and she braked sharply, heart clanking, trying to calm down. The bridge poured her over the river, the streets led her north like iron filings, and there was 37th, and there was their street.

But she could not turn down it. She drove down 39th instead. Post-war houses, horrible apartments; that block must be it. Maybe their windows looked back this way, and they would see her, spying on them.

Across the freeway she could see the cemetery. She wound her way over there, and walked along the lanes close to her mother's grave, and her father's. No flowers, nothing to leave. It didn't matter, anyway. Her mother was not there. Just an old dress and a pair of black shoes. Shoes for a corpse, what stupidity. We really should put our dead in trees and let them blow away, she thought. Her father: something of him was still there. Probably because she had visited this place so often with her mother. Iron filings, iron filings. She bent down and kissed the gravestones, one after the other. George Purdy, Elizabeth Purdy, United in Death.

Back in the car, the sun was coming through the car window, warm for February. The manila envelope was lying on the seat. She tore it open: a bunch of sketches and a half-finished watercolour of Pearce, done by the rules from the portraits book, with a penciled cross through his eyes and forehead, abandoned. Lorraine must not have liked it. But it was pretty close.

Clary stared at her boy, at his eyes, his mouth. What could she do? She could try to do better.

The truth was she did not need her house any more. She should have moved when her mother died. She needed to get shucked of it, and now, with all the empty rooms rattling around her, it only made sense that they have it.

Paul would let her stay at his house, while she found something small. She booked a truck, rented a storage unit, and spent a couple of days packing the china and crystal as carefully as their value required, clearing out sideboards and doing the sorting she had been putting off for years. Her mother's treasures would need appraisal before selling; about time to get rid of this burden of glittering pride.

Thinking of burdens, she put a For Sale sign in the window of her mother's car, with her phone number and the price. An hour later Mrs. Bunt knocked on the door and offered to buy it for cash. Nice for her to have some independence from Mr. Bunt, Clary thought, and gave her the key. Mrs. Bunt started the car and drove it forward twenty feet. It looked right at home.

Once everything breakable was packed, and the place ready, she washed her hair and dressed in jeans and drove over to 38th Street. The apartment complex was as bad from the front as from the back. Tattered curtains in some of the windows, tinfoil creased onto others. Dirty snow drifted the courtyard, baring odd patches of dirty gra.s.s. There was a bell for Super, with no name plate. Clary pushed that one. The linoleum tiles in the foyer were lifting and broken. The gla.s.s between the mailbox area and the inner lobby had been cleaned, though, so Clary could see when a door opened down the hall and someone came out.

Lorraine. Her step checked, seeing Clary. But she pressed the lever to open the door.

"Hi," she said. No questions.

"Hi," Clary said. She didn't know how to start, now, seeing Lorraine. A kerchief on her head to cover the cropped hair; navy pants and a blue blouse. Too big for her shoulders, but her poor abdomen was still rounded from the steroids. Maybe she had more colour in her skin; it was hard to tell in the bad light of the lobby. Her eyebrows were drawn on. Clary remembered kissing her cheek.

"Come in," Lorraine said, holding the door wider.

"I don't-I didn't come for a visit, really." The children wouldn't be home, but Pearce would. She stopped in the doorway, and took over holding the heavy gla.s.s.

Lorraine turned her head back to see the apartment door, still open a few inches.

"What's up, then?"

"I have a proposition," Clary began, as she had decided to. "You need-naturally, you need your own place. But I have been thinking of-"

Lorraine interrupted her. "He already called. This place isn't great, you were right. Clay hasn't had much luck talking to the management, either. We were going to find something better, but then we lucked into the duplex, and we're very-It will work out good. It was really kind of him. I probably have you to thank about that too."

Clary tried to understand all that.

"I know he's giving us a break on the rent, but he won't have to for long. And we'll take good care of it, so you don't have to be worried about him and Grace losing out."

Moreland's duplexes. Clary leaned against the steel door frame. From the open apartment door she could hear Pearce, his grizzling complaint-cry.

Her chest hurt. She was going to have to see somebody about this. She could not bear so much physical pain.

"Darwin said Fern called her dad to ask if he had any ideas, and it was so lucky because those tenants were leaving this week, so we don't even have to wait. Moreland arranged it all over the phone. It's the blue set on Palmer, the right-hand one. The kids are going to like it way better over there, and the other thing is, it's just inside the Brundstone School area-you'll be glad to hear that. They'll have to bus, but it'll work out good." Lorraine smiled, almost a laugh. Wasn't she going to see what was wrong with Pearce?

"So what did you-?"

"Oh. I was at the hospital, and they gave me this envelope for you," Clary said. She handed it to Lorraine.

"Huh!" Lorraine shuffled the papers out of the envelope. "These were just garbage."

The picture of Pearce was not there. Clary had left it on the kitchen table. Because she had known, all along, that this would not work.

"Well," she said. "I wanted to say that I would send over the bunk beds, for the kids." She never used the word kids, it felt strange in her mouth.

"That would be great, if you can't use them."

What for, would she use them? She looked at Lorraine, and Lorraine looked back at her, matching her weight for weight.

"Bertrice told me you called," Lorraine said. "She wondered who you were."

Clary said nothing. Nothing to say.

"I said you were our friend, who had helped out. What was your plan there?"

Salt taste licked at the back of Clary's throat. They were both very angry, the small lobby was full of heat.

"I'll tell them you said hi," Lorraine said, taking back the gla.s.s door to let Clary go.

Clary just nodded, because she had a dragon inside her mouth, and it would come out in fire if she opened her lips and let it.

42. So various, so beautiful, so new.

So she did not need to ask Paul if she could stay at his house. And now she had to stay in hers.

She left a message on his machine at the church, saying that she was going to Davina for a few days. He would not know that she could not drive out to Davina, as she might if she was in trouble, because n.o.body was there-and because of the amazing betrayal of Moreland giving them the duplex. She put the painting of Pearce in the kitchen junk drawer, turned the ringer off on her phone, and didn't answer the door. When Moreland and Grace called from Hawaii she did not answer; she did not listen to her messages. She lay in bed, not knowing how to get up, and gradually slept herself out of the worst of it.

Mrs. Zenko called twice from London. The only time Clary answered the phone was when it was a Vancouver number, 604.

"How you doing?" Darwin asked her. The line was crackly, a cell phone, it sounded like.

"Not too good," she said.

"It's hard," he said, then silence; was that the whole sentence?

"How could you do it? How could you let Fern?" It was a bad connection, she couldn't tell if he wasn't speaking, or if the phone was cutting out. "Are you there?"

Silence, then a phrase, "...you always..." Always what?

He faded in again: "...Moreland to have a turn..." Then empty air.

"Darwin?"

After a minute she tried again. "How could you leave?"

She didn't even know if he could hear her, if he would answer. She babbled into the phone, "I miss them too much, I can't remember how to function without anybody. I couldn't say goodbye or tell them what was happening, they didn't let me! The house is empty-I can't eat, or sleep-it's too hard, missing them."

She stopped. Was he hearing? There was no answer.

"I thought she was my friend!" What a babyish thing to say, how exposed, and how exactly honest. There was half of the hurt, right there.

Nothing but air replied. Then after a moment, faintly, "...miss you..."

"Oh, I miss you too, and Fern, and-" She couldn't say the rest of them.

"...back," he said. He seemed to say.

When the truck she had forgotten to cancel came, she had the movers take the packed boxes to the storage s.p.a.ce anyway. They'd be out of the way until she arranged for the appraisal, when she was ready to work her way out of the financial hole she'd dug, this wasted year.

She got the movers to dismantle the bunk beds and deliver them to the right-hand blue duplex, 1008 or 1006, she couldn't remember which. One of Moreland's nice duplexes, s.p.a.cious enough, two bedrooms on the main and a couple of extra rooms finished in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Clary knew them well, she had often helped Grace clean them before new tenants. Blindly she bundled up the bedding, and at the last moment added the curtains from the children's room.

After the men had left she realized that she had forgotten Pearce's crib, in her bedroom. She took it apart herself and put the pieces in the children's room closet, and shut their door.

Once the box mess was out of the living room, and n.o.body could know what a fool she had been, trying to give away her house, she called Paul. She did not want to, because his presence brought their absence too near, but it was not Paul's fault that they were gone and she could not punish him for it, now that she had regained her balance. He came over immediately, out of loneliness or out of duty, she could not tell.

He had been to see the Gages, had arrived as they were moving into their new place.

"They should not have shut you out," he said. "I can't understand why they would find it necessary to cut the children off from you, from your help."

From him, too, Clary saw, because he was a.s.sociated with her, even though he could pretend to be on a parish visit.

"The man from Swingline was there, helping with the move. And his wife, she seemed very involved. She told me they're very fond of Clayton." Paul's tone had an edge to it, the first time Clary had heard him like that; as if he thought the wife was a bit too fond of Clayton. It satisfied her in an ugly way, to think of the wife being foolish, and to imagine Lorraine seeing it too. She had a bad taste in her mouth, but of course she did. How long since she had eaten anything but toast?

They went out for dinner, but it was an unhappy evening. Paul took her back to her house. They'd been apart for more than a week, and found themselves making love without consciously deciding to, and continued because it was better than talking, better than thinking.

Lying beside Clary in the dark, Paul said, "...the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor cert.i.tude, nor peace, nor help for pain..."

Clary turned her head and looked at his barely visible profile.

"Everything you say to me is a poem. You never speak to me yourself."

"I-"

"I-You-" She waited.

"I say what I can."

"Not enough."

He said nothing.