Coming Up for Air Page 10

  Red, asleep beside her, rolled over and mumbled. That face, the way his hair curled behind the ear, the smell of him. She would have touched him, but.

  She put on a hefty wool sweater over her nightgown and pulled on a pair of Red’s thick grey boot socks. Downstairs, she set the coffee machine and turned up the thermostat and stood in the middle of the kitchen staring at the floor, staring at nothing, waiting for the coffee. When it was ready, she poured it into a thermos and then went to the hall closet. Boots and coat on, scarf wrapped around the bottom half of her face, she took her coffee out to the porch. The cosmic silence of snow. There must have been five or six inches, and it was still falling. Hot coffee in the throat, down the gullet, and she stepped off the porch into airy snow that gave no resistance and filled her boots.

  Open-mouthed, she turned her face up to the falling flakes, which seemed to form twenty metres above out of thin air then whirl chaotically to the earth. Flakes landed in the divots of her eyes and melted. Flakes landed in her mouth and tasted like paper. The sky, obliterated.

  She ran as far as a big oak and stopped there. Each of its bare, dark branches, down to the thinnest, topped perfectly by a shadow of white. A blue jay, icy in its colouring, took off from high up in the tree and set off a cascade, and now there was snow melting under her scarf, melting hot. The yard, before she ran across it, had been flawless but now, with the trail she cut, a trail that was all blue shadows, it looked like some cumbersome, dead thing had been dragged through the snow. She was afraid of what she was going to do.

  * * *

  Anouk woke a few hours later, congested, nose red. Nora had to lug her through the nebulizing, the cupping and the medication. She made Anouk porridge with raisins and a scoop of peanut butter for extra fat, and a pot of hot chocolate. All these tasks she moved through as if today were a dream, her life already unrecognizable before she’d even done the thing that was going to change it. She built a fire for Anouk because, even though she couldn’t stop the cold in her daughter’s nose, in her sinuses, she could keep her warm.

  The problem was, Anouk felt fine, like any kid with a minor cold would. She wanted to go out in the snow. A pitched whine crept into her voice; she rejected offers of books or games. So Nora turned on the television. Red came downstairs long after breakfast and together they monitored her temperature, pressed on her glasses of juice and water. Anything to battle infection. They did an extra session of physio to keep ahead of the mucus building up in her lungs, and outside the snow fell so steadily that at one point the trees on the far side of the yard were obscured.

  Nora watched this through the kitchen window and Red came up beside her.

  ‘You okay?’ he said.

  ‘I’m fine.’ Fine: the meanest, deadest word uttered in marriage. ‘I’m just worried about her. All this snow. What if we have to get her somewhere?’

  ‘We follow the steps.’

  ‘Maybe we should just go now. We can be in Toronto before it gets too bad and then, if we need the hospital, we’re already there.’

  He put his arm around her, spoke gently. ‘Look at her in there,’ he whispered. ‘She’s watching back-to-back reruns of that show where rich teenagers fuck each other all day in their beach cabanas. She’s not even coughing.’

  ‘There’s no sex in that show.’

  ‘It’s implied.’

  ‘You think she gets it?’

  ‘No way.’

  * * *

  Later, Nora tucked Anouk into bed and turned off her bedside lamp. In the dark, she laid her hand firmly on Anouk’s forehead.

  ‘I won’t be able to sleep,’ said Anouk, turning her head from Nora’s hand.

  ‘It’s been a lazy day.’

  ‘It’s not even eight yet.’ The whine.

  ‘That voice,’ said Nora. ‘You could clear a room with it.’

  ‘You mean shatter glass with it.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘That’s what you usually say. You could shatter glass with that voice.’

  Nora kissed her forehead, made no move to get up from the bed. Garlic and ground beef frying in a pan. The smell and sizzle of this reached Anouk’s bedroom from downstairs. Red, cooking a meal. Unaware of this night. Outside the window, the sky was lofty and purple, turbulent like the underwater view of a breaking wave. The snow had stopped falling but the weather report warned of more to come, some time after midnight.

  ‘Why aren’t you going, Mom?’

  ‘I’m going.’

  * * *

  When Red slammed the kitchen door on his way out, the clock slid down the wall to the floor and see-sawed for a moment on its lower rim, before tipping face down to totter and settle like a coin. The kitchen was charged with the cold air of his leaving. A moment later, across the yard, the shed window snapped yellow light and she knew at least he wasn’t planning to wander in the snow all night. There was an electric floor heater in there, a couch. The heater was a hazard and the shed a tinder box, but.

  She went to the small room off the side of the kitchen and pulled open the door of the hot and ticking dryer, loaded her arms with still-warm clothes, the milky smell of hot cotton. She carried this load into the living room and dumped it on the couch, the clothes a tangled mass of vacant feet and arms and legs. Solace in the repetition of the mundane, of everyday jobs: snapping socks, squaring shoulder seams, aligning the legs of pants.

  She had said to him that she did it because she was lonely. But that wasn’t true. She wasn’t even a little bit lonely. Given the chance, she would have been more alone.

  She paired socks together, their thready guts exposed, into ugly little balls, and laid the stray singles over the arm of the couch. She got down on her knees and pushed her face into the neatly folded clothes, warm and maternal. At least something was.

  * * *

  Red was not a heavy type of man but as soon as he came back into the house, some hours later, boots shucked off, coat dropped to the floor, the volume of the house halved. Nora had moved from the floor to the couch, not able to sleep, had swept the folded clothes on to the carpet. Red came in and sat down on the floor, his back against the armchair.

  ‘In the movies the first thing people say is, how long has this been going on?’ he said.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I don’t know how, I . . . I’m embarrassed for you.’

  She nodded.

  ‘So. How long then?’

  ‘Seven months. Eight.’

  ‘Pretty fucking stupid bitch of a thing to do.’

  ‘Red.’

  ‘Get my name out of your mouth.’ He stared hard at the floor.

  ‘Do you want me to leave?’

  A tight stretch of time like holding breath. ‘No.’

  They hadn’t heard her come down the stairs but suddenly there was Anouk in the middle of the room. She had taken off her nightgown and was shivering in her underwear; her hair was damp with sweat. Nora moved quickly to pick her up, the girl hot and bony in her arms. She weighed so little. Then, Red’s fingers dug deeply between the bones and tendons of Nora’s elbow, hard enough to hurt.

  ‘I’ll take her,’ he said, and gathered Anouk up like a doll. The only thing Nora could do was to follow them up the stairs and into Anouk’s room. Nora turned on the light. Anouk’s sheets and duvet were on the floor and the fitted sheet had been stripped from the mattress. Red looked at the bedding on the floor and he looked at Nora and then he looked away, so she picked the twisted sheet off the floor and spun it open and stretched it over the mattress. It seemed crucial now to align the corners of the sheet perfectly over the corners of the mattress. She collected the other sheet from the floor and tucked it neatly under the foot of the mattress and pulled it up to the head of the bed, smoothing it with her palms as she went, then folded the top edge back on itself, ready for Anouk. Red settled her into the bed and Nora ducked
in beside him with the duvet and there was his smell, his winter skin and the grass he would have smoked earlier in the shed.

  Anouk sat up, coughed wetly and spat a mouthful of sputum into the cup she kept next to her bed.

  ‘The cough touches my throat if I lie down,’ she said.

  ‘Why didn’t you call us earlier?’ Red asked, stroking the wet hair off Anouk’s forehead with his thumb. He propped the pillows behind her neck.

  Nora, perched on the end of the bed, imagined she wasn’t a part of this scene.

  Anouk leaned over and coughed again and this cough led to another and another, a fit lasting several minutes. Her cup was full so Red took it and left the room. Afraid to disrupt the scene, Nora watched her from the end of the bed. Red came back with a box of tissues and a new cup and a wet cloth for Anouk’s face.

  ‘Go to bed, Nora,’ he said, his back to her. ‘I’ll do the night.’

  * * *

  Nora opened the bedroom window to let in the cold air and lay in bed listening to the slow dance of wind and tree. Her heart kicked in her throat and ears, kicked so hard her whole body was exhausted. She was not going to be able to sleep tonight. In the dark she could just make out the contours of this room: Red’s clothes hanging over the back of a chair, one sock and a pair of boxers on the floor beneath it. Closet door that never shut completely and a tumble of shoes at its base. Red’s Jays hat on the bedpost, a stack of books on the bedside table. A stout, dusty candle on the bedside table too, which hadn’t been lit in years. She pulled open the table drawer and scrabbled in it for a lighter. Found one and lit the candle and it sparked, smelled of burning dust. The room became shadows and it no longer belonged to her. She wondered where was the sense of relief she thought she had coming.

  Anouk’s cough, rattling down the hall, was wet and desperate. She wanted to go to her daughter but didn’t dare. There was the sound of the cough and of the wind outside, and there was the sound of Red’s voice too, deep and soothing and humble and kind.

  18

  Anouk

  Ottawa River, 1987

  Each cough was a punch. Too big for the ribcage, too big for the throat. Some were so violent, Anouk was afraid that if she fell asleep she would suffocate. She was afraid her ribs might break. This was possible; it had happened to other people. Experience had taught her not to cry because this only made things wetter and stuffier.

  Her mom had gone to bed, but her dad was here and she was glad it was him. He kept his hands off her, didn’t even look at her, didn’t try to stop it. Only touched her to wipe the stuff off her chin. Once or twice he tried to coax her to sleep and she must have slept a little because there were dreams. Sticks and mud and half-eaten bits of fruit in the mud.

  The hour finally came when the light through the window changed to grey, and her dad was asleep with his chin on his chest. She poked his knee and he opened one eye, lifted his head slowly.

  ‘Oh my God, that hurts,’ he whispered, rubbing his neck. He grimaced and smiled both. ‘Good morning.’

  Her throat was too pummelled to speak. Her ribs ached too.

  ‘Did you sleep at all?’

  She shrugged. Her chest was heavy with mucus. Breathing was difficult. She scratched a few words out. ‘Don’t you want to go to bed?’

  ‘Nah.’ His face had darkened, as if he just that moment realized how tired he was. ‘We’ll let your mother sleep.’

  No school. Her dad stayed home from work too. Her parents watched her closely over the next few days and she watched them too. One afternoon, the light fading by three, Anouk watched her dad go out in the snow with no coat, and she watched him through the window as he stood next to the big fir tree with his hands on his hips and looked up into its branches. When he came back in and sat in the armchair across from her, she said, ‘What were you doing just standing out there?’

  ‘Thinking about that old fir.’

  ‘What were you thinking about it?’

  ‘I might get rid of it.’

  ‘Why?’

  Her mother came through the room then and just walked between them on her way to somewhere else, and his eyes followed her until she was gone.

  ‘Why?’ Anouk asked again.

  He shrugged one shoulder.

  Every time Anouk coughed, which was a lot, her parents checked the colour of what came up. As long as it stayed a light, oatmeal brown, she could stay home. If it looked green, hospital.

  And then one morning, before dawn, she woke with dry eyes, lids creaking on hinges and a familiar, gritty tickle in her lungs, the sandpapery rub against her ribs. She was full of fluid and brought up a mouthful, spat it into a tissue. It was thick. A collection of tiny globes all nestled together like frog spawn, and green as pond scum. She called for her dad and he came quickly, hair on edge, and a rumple and sideways-ness to the clothes he’d slept in. She showed him the tissue, and he sat on the edge of the bed and searched his beard with thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Well then,’ he said.

  ‘Can we wait another day? See what happens?’ She coughed and spat again. A feverish, sidestep swoosh inside her skull.

  Nora appeared in the doorway then, leaning against the door frame with her arms crossed over her chest and looking heavy. When she saw that Anouk was watching her, she bent to pick at something on the knee of her pyjamas.

  ‘We have to bring her in,’ Red said. ‘We’ll take her local.’

  ‘I think we should go straight to Toronto,’ Nora said. ‘They’ll just send us there anyway.’ She took a big breath, filled her lungs right up, and went straight to Anouk’s closet and opened it. Pulled things out – old boots, Lego, a deflated volleyball – and scattered them on the carpet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Red asked.

  ‘Where’s her bag?’

  ‘Hall closet.’

  All the song was gone from their words, Anouk’s parents, when they spoke to each other. They were beat. She was tiring them out. Nora left the room and came back a moment later with Anouk’s bag, the one they used for long stays at the hospital.

  They still did her regular physio, cupping her back, even though within the hour her lungs would be full of fluid again. Anouk in fever, almost pleasant, waited on the couch while Nora worried a trail around the kitchen, packing food and water for the car, stopping to look out of the window at the snow. Red was upstairs packing pills and the nebulizer – the motorized compressor, the tubing, the mouthpiece. To nebulize: to inhale the medicine by mist, to inhale it straight into the lungs, so that it would loosen the gunk that clogged the cilia, making it easier to expel.

  The world outside the window was still and the sky a flat grey, and the pine trees that circled their yard like palisades were laden with white.

  Nora came out of the kitchen and went to the bottom of the stairs and called up to Red. ‘You nearly ready? Radio says more snow in the next few hours. I want to get south of it.’

  Red answered with the heavy fall of his thick-socked feet on the stairs, the stairs stripped of carpet and splintery rough. He lumbered with a backpack hanging off one shoulder, a sleeping bag tucked under each arm, and gripped in one hand the hard-shelled case that held the nebulizer. He dumped it all by the front door and slowly his body rose.

  ‘We’ve got to get a move on,’ said Nora.

  ‘What does it look like I’m doing?’

  Anouk watched. She watched Red collect coats and hats and gloves, and pile them next to the bags. She watched Nora move from kitchen to living room and back again. She watched the first new flakes of snow reel and curl past the large living-room window, falling slowly and softly as if they’d been dropped accidentally and would not be followed by any more.

  19

  L’Inconnue

  Paris, 1898

  It was two long weeks before I saw Axelle again. She came unannounced to Madame Debord
’s apartment in the afternoon, while Madame was sleeping. Axelle had gone that day with some of the other girls from La Samaritaine to a very odd place, the city’s morgue, and she was desperate to tell me everything.

  ‘You have a fascination with death,’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t,’ she said. She sat primly on the edge of Madame’s sofa, having refused coffee or any other refreshments, and was pulling her gloves off, one finger at a time. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Our last outing was to the taxidermist. Now you’re touring the morgue.’

  ‘Oh, everyone goes to the morgue.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to see that?’

  ‘I don’t know. The entrance is free? And the show is. Well. You can’t look away.’

  ‘It seems intrusive.’

  ‘Some say it’s your civic duty to go. Bodies are found in this city all the time, especially in the river, and when no one knows who they are – who they were – their remains are exhibited in the morgue for anyone to see and, with luck, identify. But it’s a gruesome show. I had to go just to stop people asking me: have you been yet? Why haven’t you been?’

  ‘And? Was it worthwhile?’

  ‘I won’t soon forget it. The whole thing is like a carnival show. Outside on the street, in front of the building, there are hawkers selling all kinds of things, gingerbreads and apples, toys for children. I heard that once, a body was found in a chest, and on the day the chest was exhibited in the morgue, a hawker stood out front selling toy versions of the same. It’s ghastly.

  ‘You wouldn’t think there were dead people just on the other side of the doors. The queue was enormous and you cannot imagine how nervous I became, just from having to wait. When we got to the front, there was a wooden partition set across the doorway, which blocked our view of the interior, and from inside there was a current of very cool air, and an odour that was like face powder. I almost turned away but the girls, they were determined.’