Good To A Fault Part 27

"Cheap," Lorraine said. Almost laughing. She had her wallet under the pillow too, and fumbled through it for a couple of twenties, her ashy fingers long and slow. "Army, you know. Iron thing."

"With a stop watch and so on?"

"Yeah. All the stops."

"Something athletic. Got it. Anything else?"

"Darwin has it covered."

Clary adjusted the orange pillow and Lorraine let her head fall back. Poor face, poor swollen cheeks. Clary kissed her. "Thanks," she said, with her eyes closed.

The shops were crowded, of course, but Clary found a good watch on sale, only twenty more than Lorraine had given her. She splashed out on wrapping paper and tags, bright ribbon and sprigs of real holly.

Christmas was always like this for most people, she supposed-complicated, urgent, full of events. For the last few years Clary had driven down to Davina early on Christmas morning. Gliding over the snowy prairie, on the one day in the year when n.o.body went anywhere, all alone under the sun-dogged sun.

Paul watched them troop into the midnight service: Clary carrying Pearce, Mrs. Zenko next, then Grace and Moreland holding Dolly's hands and Darwin shambling up behind. Fern must be at home with Trevor. So many people to be connected to: last Christmas he'd never heard of most of them. Clary, with her red silk on. (Without it, the pale silk of her flank.) He wandered through the last Ma.s.s of the old life, the first of the new. He lit the candles, sang where it was required, and listened to the readings as Frank Rich intoned them, his sad ba.s.set-hound voice trying to trumpet: Fear not! When it was time for the homily, Paul stood and spoke to the congregation, but of course he was speaking to Darwin, to Clary, to the children, and Lorraine. "Angels, we're told, have intense, painful, beauty. Shining with the grandeur of G.o.d-the invisible world made visible. Terrifying, for those ordinary people they spoke to. The first thing the angel told Zachariah was Do not be afraid! And to Mary, before telling her she would have a child who would be the son of G.o.d: Do not be afraid! On Christmas night, with the heavenly host, the angel says to the shepherds on their hillside, Do not be afraid! I bring you good news of great joy, which will be to all people...

"Fear is always with us: that we are not good enough or strong enough, and so will fail; that we will be hurt. Fear that what we love will be taken from us. Fear of dying, even fear of G.o.d, or of no G.o.d. But G.o.d surprises us by giving us strength to bear what we must; by giving us joy when we think nothing but sadness is possible. G.o.d became human to experience the power that death had over us. Do not be afraid-G.o.d is aware of us in the world, aware of the world we live in, striving for the great good of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The world is charged with the grandeur of G.o.d, it will flame out like shining from shook foil."

He sat down.

Shook foil made Dolly think of Mrs. Zenko's house, where she smoothed out the tinfoil and used it again. She had a special drawer for keeping it. If Mrs. Zenko shook people, she would smooth them out again and save them for later.

Clary, tired and abstracted, felt a cold doubt about the Gerard Manley Hopkins she had wrapped for Paul. He must have it already-but this one was beautiful: heavy paper, all the poems. She could have got a pair of gloves for him, he needed gloves. But meeting his eyes as he sat in his chair to allow a moment of quiet, she thought, it's all right. It will flame out...

The hymn began, "Silent Night." Dolly loved that one. Trevor could not keep awake this late, poor Trevor, but it was all right because Fern was with him. Grace said she had pyjamas to give her later, because in her and Moreland's family everyone always has new pyjamas on Christmas Eve. Fern's new ones had a little ragged silky frill around the bottom of the pants, maybe hers would be like that. Dolly leaned against Clary's warm arm in her soft wool coat, that colour called taupe, with the black velvet collar. Dolly wished her mom had a coat like that. But she leaped backwards from the brink of that. Do not be afraid, Paul said. Dear G.o.d, Dolly thought, but did not know what to put next. My mom. The organ was playing and Paul was coming down the aisle again and now past them and out, but he had smiled at them more than at anyone. Because he loved Clary, but also the rest of them. Maybe that would count for something.

At the church door Darwin said he would see them in the morning. "I like that surprise thing," he said to Paul, and headed off for the hospital through the snow-floating night.

Clary held out her hand and was surprised herself when Paul put his arms around her tightly, in full view of all the parish, at least the late-night parish.

"I missed you today," he said. He had snowflakes in his hair, and on his red satin stole. He looked strong and happy. She loved him.

"Will you come for breakfast?"

"I will," he said.

"And for presents, and for dinner? We need you to carry turkey."

"Mrs. Zenko told me how to make cranberry sauce, and I'm doing it before I go to sleep."

The street was quiet, even with the departing congregation and their cheerful voices. Moreland fit Pearce's seat into the holder while Grace got the sleepy Dolly in, and wedged herself in beside her.

"Home, James," Grace said to Clary. "And don't spare the horses."

Paul watched them go. The dearest freshness, he thought. The night had a glow to it, streetlights refracted in the falling snow, the city lights staining upwards in a peachy aureole into the night sky. Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Cranberry sauce. No time to waste.

39. Christmas present.

At 8 a.m. on Christmas morning Moreland opened the door to Paul and Clayton, standing together on the porch with their arms full of presents. Odd pair, Moreland thought, but Christmas makes strange bedfellows, probably on purpose. He gave them coffee and kept them out of Grace's way while she got breakfast going.

Dolly felt mysteriously irritable, like she'd eaten too much candy. She unwrapped each present carefully, peeling the tape so slowly that Trevor begged to be allowed to open another one while they were waiting. Pearce beat on the drum Darwin had given him until Darwin said he'd changed his mind and put it away up high.

Dolly's present from Clary was boots, red suede with rubber soles so you could run, embroidery up the sides, and sheepskin lining. They were so nice that she leaped up and hugged Clary with one boot in each hand, and the boots swung around and whacked Clary by accident, but she didn't get mad. Fern gave her magnetic earrings, and Grace and Moreland gave her a fleece hoodie, and Gran gave both her and Trevor a lifesaver book. Then there were only Darwin's present and her dad's left to open. She was scared that she would like Darwin's present better, and that would make her dad mad. The grown-ups were opening too, so she could delay things by folding the wrapping paper, rolling up the ribbon around her hand, tidying her pile of presents so far. Darwin and her dad liked their sweaters from her and Trevor; they put them on right away. They were twins, except her dad looked uncomfortable, sitting cross-legged on the floor, but he always did.

Clary opened a present from Paul, a book of poems, and she laughed, and handed him one to open from her. "You're joking," he said-and when he unwrapped his, it was the exact same book by the same guy. That was funny.

"Great minds think alike," Grace and Moreland said at the same time.

Dolly picked up the one from her dad. Whatever it was, she would make sure that she didn't like Darwin's better. It was bulky but not too heavy. She pulled the tape off. Purple, soft, what was it? She tore the paper. A big-a velvet pillow, with a round velvet b.u.t.ton in the centre, frayed-out fringe all around it in different layers of purple and blue. The velvet was the softest thing she had ever touched. It went one way, and when you brushed your hand over it the other way it changed to a darker, sweeter colour.

She lifted her eyes and saw her dad looking at her. "I made it," he said. "For you. For when I-"

"I love it," she said.

He looked so happy.

Lorraine pulled herself up out of empty sleep and looked at the rectangular whiteness of the window. Christmas. The freckly nurse was on, she was a kind one. She found the new lipstick and blush from Clary, and propped up the mirror. Lorraine wiped off most of the lipstick because it looked so weird over the bled-out whiteness of her lips, but what was left probably cheered up her face.

The nurse looked at her critically, then flicked the blush again. "My mom always used to put a dab of rouge on her chin," she said. "Instant pretty, she called it."

Lorraine looked again. "Okay," she said. She smiled, to test it. "Less sick, at least."

"You're doing well," the nurse said seriously. Sherry was her name, like the drink, and her freckles were that colour. "You're doing a good job."

"Will you get the bag in the closet?" Lorraine asked. "Presents."

If she lay on her side there was room for them on the bed, except for the tricycle Darwin had spirited up last night, with a huge bow on the handlebars. That could stay in the closet for Pearce to find.

She could hear them coming: Trevor's voice piping closer, wanting to be the one to give her their present. The room filled up, the children all crowding up to the bed. She hugged them over the bright pile.

"Don't wait," she said, when Clary tried to stem the tide. "Open everything!"

Paper on the bed, on the floor, everywhere, ribbon wrapping around them. Darwin helped Pearce open the closet door. He stared at the trike for a while, touching the white handgrip, then the saddle, then the wheel; he let them help him onto it and sat while they put his feet on the pedals. Trevor offered to show him how to ride.

Where was Clayton? She pulled Darwin's present out from under the pillow, and watched him open Rose's dad's watch. He put it up to his ear, to hear it ticking, with his eyes closed.

Six strange white orchids on a bending stalk from Paul; they found a good spot for it on the window ledge. A cream-coloured shawl from Clary, soft wool, very pretty. Flowers and a shroud, Lorraine thought, but she put it around her shoulders and thanked Clary nicely.

In a momentary silence they could hear footsteps coming down the hall. Dinner already? Dolly went to the door to see.

Her dad. He was carrying a chair, a big chair with legs that clumped on the floor every few steps, sounding like several people. He put the chair down at the door-then had to back it up awkwardly to get in himself. Finally he and the chair were both in the room.

"For you," he said to Lorraine. "For our place."

Lorraine pulled the covers away and Darwin helped her to sit up. Clary said, "Oh-" but stopped herself, even before Paul touched her arm. Dolly swivelled the rolling i.v. pole to let her mother walk across the floor slowly to reach the chair and sit, the arms holding her, the chintz pillow sinking under her back. "That's down," Clayton said, and she smiled at him in her old way.

Everyone exclaimed at the beautiful chair, the workmanship, the cord edgings. Trevor sat on one arm, Dolly leaned on the other, and Clayton showed how he had put wheels on the legs, so it could be rolled around to vacuum under it.

Grace and Moreland and Fern arrived in the middle of all that, and admired it too. The wheels were good enough to go down the hall, Clayton said, sure they were. After a little trouble getting the chair back out through the door, they rolled Lorraine down to the lounge where the movable feast was laid out on coffee tables. Lorraine asked Sherry the nurse to eat with them, and Clary was grateful when she sat chatting away to Mrs. Pell while still keeping one eye on Lorraine.

The food was hot, even the gravy; none of the good plates got broken; and even if only Clary and Grace knew how complicated the transport had been, everyone enjoyed the dinner better than any Christmas dinner they had ever eaten, so there was a considerable feeling of d.i.c.kens in the room, but n.o.body, not even Paul, said G.o.d bless us, every one.

In the evening Clary heard Mrs. Zenko at the front door.

"Now tell me there's a bite of pudding left, and some of your mother's hard sauce," she said, slipping out of her short boots. "That's a long drive back from Battleford in the dark."

"We saved some for you," Clary said, taking the packages from her arms.

"One more present to open," Mrs. Zenko said. "All mitts, I'm afraid, no originality at all. Well, slippers for Mrs. Pell," she confided. "It's bound to be cold on that floor out there."

Clary found the package with her own name on it, and opened it. Not mitts: an elegant pair of black leather gloves. She kissed Mrs. Zenko and reached for the top of the hall shelf where she had left the tiny velvet box with her mother's pink tourmaline chrysanthemum ring.

Two dew-drop tears came spilling out of Mrs. Zenko's eyes when she saw the ring.

"I should have given it to you long ago," Clary said.

Trevor brought Mrs. Zenko the knock-down birdie toy. "Do you want to hear China?"

"Yes."

Trevor shook it. Little bells sounded inside. China.

Too much activity, too much company, left Lorraine shaky and sleepless for a long time. Finally, when all the lights were dimmed and the nurse (not Sherry now but the oldest one, Debbie) had given her a back rub, Lorraine fell asleep. She had a terrible dream of Dolly dying by falling into Christmas ornaments. She fell straight into the tree in the apartment in Trimalo, and all the gla.s.s ornaments shattered, and she was cut to shreds. Lorraine woke up with her heart pounding. It was not true. It was not true.

At home in his empty house, in his empty bed, Paul had a complicated dream, that Dolly had asked him to drive her out to a big field full of stones. They walked across the dry yellow gra.s.s to Lorraine's grave, and Paul drifted off along yellow paths where every tilting old stone said Robina Tippett, 19681998. All the other stones were stones, with bones lying near them, but under that one was Binnie, still brightly alive. It didn't matter that he'd seen her dead, and knew her to be gone. That parcel of bones and skin that had been shown to him was not her, anyway, it was a puppet of Binnie. The real one was down there under the dead gra.s.s. He looked back. Dolly was crouched low over the middle of Lorraine's grave, right about where her mother's stomach would be. Poor child, she was looking down at the yellow gra.s.s between her hands, flat on the slight round of the grave. "You left us all alone," she shouted through the funnel of her hands into the earth, but the wind sucked her voice away. It was a wild wind. Dolly pounded on the turf with her fists and shrieked into the twisting roots of the gra.s.s, as loud as a train coming screaming around the track. Paul helped her up. Crying with dry, wide-open eyes, she kicked at the gravestone as he led her past it, and turned back to kick it again, hard. He almost woke, almost broke through the dream's surface, but he dove back down and took Dolly for an ice cream cone. Then he could wake up.

Clary dreamed that she took Dolly to the graveyard by mistake instead of school, and she lay down on the cold gra.s.s on her mother's grave. She cried and whispered how good a mother, how good. Whose grave was that? Was it Dolly's mother or her own? What girl was lying on the grave? It was Clary herself. Paul lay on his sister's grave nearby, whispering good, good. No response from them, the quick or the dead.

Waking, breathless, Clary knew that Lorraine would die soon.

Pearce was asleep beside her. It would be all right, she would look after him. She would take care of all of them. Even Clayton, only a lost sheep, not evil, making that good chair, which would actually look fine in the living room. The children would like that, to remind them of Lorraine.

She slid back to sleep, telling herself that this was the best thing she had ever done in her life. She loved how brave Lorraine was, how valiantly she struggled against this terrible illness. She even loved herself-how she had made a safe, orderly life for the children, had learned to do this hard good thing. Paul would come and live here too. They would come home in the evening, after a dinner party with the Haywoods, and carry the sleeping children in from the car. And although they would make love, she would have one ear open for Pearce, and for the children, who would be so sad when Lorraine was dead.

Dolly dreamed that she fell in love with a bald man, and he took her on a rollercoaster ride that lasted for hours.

40. Cut-out hearts.

But Lorraine did not die.

Graft-versus-host disease swept over her in three ugly weeks of sores and thrush and cramps-and then it swept away again, because she told her body to smarten up. It was Darwin's marrow, there was no reason to panic. She did the ten breaths of Zen over and over, the way Darwin had read to her. In the almost-darkness of the hospital night, Darwin's big shape in the cot against the wall, she wandered through her body with her mind's eye, allowing his marrow into her own bones, her self, becoming partly him.

Almost secretly, she turned off from that long sloping downward hallway.

After a few weeks she was measurably better. She was walking around. She was healed.

One thing Lorraine was not prepared for: the shame of recovering. When the chief doctor came in one morning to tell her officially that all her results were good, very good, she didn't know who to tell. Darwin was driving out to Davina to talk to Fern most days. Clayton was working all the time. She hoped the woman who had been moved into the bed beside her had not heard the pleasure and relief in the doctor's voice, how glad he was to be able to say, "Well! This is good! Very good!"

They said she could go home on Monday, if the weekend went well. Something for them to plan for.

Clary was the one to call. But Lorraine was ashamed to talk to her, for everything she had been doing, the huge unpaid, unpayable debt, and afraid of what that obligation would mean now.

There was also the shame of not being completely, freely, happy. How could she not be happy? Especially compared to the woman in the next bed, not so lucky, who was having exploratory surgery in the evening and sobbed to her daughter on the phone about the black options they had outlined for her.

The desperate clench in Lorraine's stomach might take a while to relax, she thought. She was not ungrateful, just slow to realize change. Having to pick up life and cope again. She didn't want to tell anyone yet.

On Monday, they said Tuesday.

Every time Clary went in Lorraine looked better. Wasn't it wonderful.

Things were improving, that was obvious, but everything was so busy, and it was February already-almost Valentine's Day. The children had to have a valentine for every child in their cla.s.ses, twenty-seven for Dolly, twenty-nine for Trevor. Clary had run over to the sc.r.a.pbooking store for card and pink tissue and paper lace doilies, and more manly trim for Trevor, and there were cut-out hearts all over the dining room table. Trevor's hand ached from printing names. When Clayton came to take Trevor out to a hockey game Clary had to say no, he couldn't go till the printing work was all done. She tried to broach the subject of some extra help for him, or maybe testing for dyslexia, but Clayton clearly didn't want to hear it.

"There's nothing wrong with my kid," he said, staring at her aggressively. His hands were dirty.

She left it for later. She could just arrange it without consulting them, after all-the times Clayton came by were few and far between. He was no help at all.

Fern had been back and forth, but after Grace and Moreland left for Hawaii on their long-planned anniversary trip, Fern told Clary she was going to Vancouver. Clary wanted to ask why, but it would seem like she was spying for Grace. She said the children would miss her, and tried to pay her for all her help. Fern wouldn't take anything. The last few months would have been impossible without her, so Clary was impatient with her, having budgeted for fair pay; and impatient with herself for resenting Fern's desertion.

She was more disturbed when Darwin said he was driving out to the coast with Fern.

"I'll go out to Tofino, see Phelan," he said. "And I'll help Fern out, like she's been helping us."

His son Phelan, she remembered with some difficulty. Who seemed to have been getting along fine without him till now. And how would Lorraine manage without him there, how would the nights be? She did not ask, but he answered.

"Clayton's going to stay late Fridays and Sat.u.r.days, but she'll be okay without me now. The nurses know her, and she's not so scared."

Besides, Clayton did not like Darwin, so maybe it was time for him to go. They packed their bags to the rafters in Fern's old car, and headed off. Trevor chased the car down the street, crying, but really the children were all right. They knew he was coming back, they were fine.

Lorraine did not need her any more, either; especially now she was getting stronger. Clary hardly ever visited the hospital these days, since Clayton was around again and clearly didn't want her there. She was busy with planning and managing; it was even hard to fit Paul in.

And she suddenly couldn't stand it at the hospital.

Instead, she let all her energy go into the children and the new school term. Things were busier than ever, with school and dentist and field trips, and getting some order back into the house after the Christmas chaos. There was a lot to arrange: the children should be taking lessons, the piano was just sitting there; and Trevor really needed to start at k.u.mon if he was going to keep up, but Clayton was so resistant that she hadn't brought that up again, she'd wait for a while. There was Dolly's museum trip to help plan, too, and Clayton never showed any initiative; even when she asked his opinion, whether the children should take piano lessons or join the church choir, he seemed peevishly content to let her see to everything-and pay for everything too. His surly whipped-dog arrogance was beginning to irritate her.

And if Lorraine was getting better, there were arrangements to work out at the house.

Clary was working out what would be best for them: they could have the bas.e.m.e.nt bedroom now that Darwin had gone west, but she'd have to find a double bed. Maybe it would be better to put them in the TV room upstairs, closer to the bathroom. That would be better. Only there wouldn't be room for Pearce's crib in there, he'd have to stay in her room.