Good To A Fault Part 3

"I don't want to take anything. I'm already taking stuff. I don't know."

Clara thought the fever was increasing.

"It's hard," Lorraine said.

"Yes," Clara said. Not knowing what else to say.

On the very top shelf of the last kitchen cupboard Darlene found a brown envelope taped down on a gla.s.s pedestal thing. Tons of money in it. It added up to seven hundred and something, counting pretty quick, one ear open for Clara coming back from the store. But it was no good to her, it was strange pink money from England. The car! She jumped down from the counter. Too far, so the b.a.l.l.s of her feet hurt, but she didn't get caught.

Finding the house in surprising disarray, Clara tidied the living room and the TV room, and the hall, and the back steps-Trevor had made a fort there with blankets and pillows-before making lunch. Mrs. Pell went to her bedroom and shut the door, and they all left her alone. Clara gave Pearce a bottle. He stared into her eyes thoughtfully while he drank, his fingers splayed against her chest.

When he fell asleep she did three loads of laundry. She remembered to phone and extend the insurance on her mother's car, thinking she might be liable if Clayton got into another accident. She made cookies and started a list of necessities on the door of the fridge: formula, diapers, chicken soup from an envelope. They did not like canned. She wrote down everything the children asked for. It seemed like they were all in cotton wool, or that same smothering membrane which had been bothering Clara herself lately.

After supper Clara walked them to the park in the darkening evening. The children played on the flat merry-go-round, Trevor standing in the middle and Darlene running it around and around, faster and faster, until she could jump up too and they went spinning on and on through the indigo night air.

Clara stood a little distance away from their orbit, letting Pearce rest against her chest, feeling the weight and the balance of his body against hers. It wasn't so hard, being with children.

4. Counting money.

At ten that night Clara went back through the hospital to Lorraine's silent room. The window was a dark rectangle in the white wall. She turned off the overhead fluorescent light, left on the small yellow bulb over the sink, and pulled the alcove curtain partway across so it wouldn't glare in Lorraine's eyes. Now they could see the lights of the city across the river, the pretty bridges, the night sky. Deep shadowy blue, not black, even so late.

"I'm worried about the kids," Lorraine said. Easier to talk in the darkness. "I'm worried about Clayton too, but not as much. He can take care of himself, more or less."

Now would be the time to mention Clayton's departure.

But Lorraine said, "I'm afraid."

All Clara could think of was, "Don't be." An unforgivable, asinine thing to say. She did not want to remember her father dying, or the horrors her mother went through. "I'm sorry. Of course you are afraid. I guess I mean, don't let superst.i.tion trap you into pretending to be positive all the time. There is no jinxing, and being blindly optimistic doesn't help."

"What does help then?"

"I pray, but it does not always-" She could think of no word but suffice, which would sound pompous. "It's hard to know what to pray for."

Lorraine snorted, and flapped her hands onto the sheet. "I know what to pray for! That my, this, thing will go away. That I will have my kids back with me. That everything will go on the way it was the day before we came to Saskatoon, when I was worrying about how to find work and a place to live, not how to live."

It was not a tirade, but a considered statement.

"I had enough worry before. I'm not going to worry now. I'm not going to pray either. I'm going to be patient and wait for this to happen." She corrected herself. "Wait for this to go away."

There were blue marks under her eyes, and her skin was puffy. The steroids, affecting her already. If her fever could be brought down they were a.s.sessing her for chemo in the morning, Clara knew, and then would come a bad time. For a moment she was glad she had been with her mother during that long struggle, so she knew a little about it, to be able to help Lorraine.

"Is there anything you like to read? Magazines? People? Or something more serious while you've got some quiet time?"

"Some of each," Lorraine said. Her pointy smile was very tired.

One more thing, though. "I don't know what to do about Darlene. She wants to see you, of course. Should I put her off, or bring her in?"

"Don't bring Trevor, not right now. But you could bring Darlene. I need her to get some stuff from the car, now that I think of it. Good thing you said."

Clara had forgotten their car, in the impound lot. "They gave us the knapsacks, that first day...I've got the children's things."

"Yeah, but I got some stuff hidden in there, in the Dart. We were living in there for the last couple weeks. You know how it is. You have to keep your stuff somewhere."

From her tone Clara supposed it was money, or even drugs. But she would not be a good judge. Maybe papers, that kind of treasure. "I'll bring Darlene tomorrow. I meant to ask if there is anyone that I should call for you. I'm not sure if Clayton has had a chance to do that."

"Nice way of putting it," Lorraine said. "No, there's no one. No one that I know where they are, anyways."

This time Clara stopped herself from saying she was sorry. She decided again not to get into Clayton's absence. "You look like you could sleep," she said. "I'll bring books tomorrow."

"Yeah," Lorraine said. "I'll catch up on that summer reading I've been meaning to get to. Don't bring Pearce. That would be hard on him."

"All right," Clara said. "I'll keep him at home. He's good, he's doing well."

"Thank you." Lorraine closed her eyes and turned her head away from Clara before she opened them again. The window looked out on all the lights across the river, a million glinting sparks.

Walking down the hall, thinking ahead to breakfast for the children, Clara did not see Paul Tippett until he took her arm, right beside her. She jumped, and he apologized, both of them speaking in whispers because it seemed so late. The hospital was closing down around them, patients being put into storage for the night.

"How is your family?" he asked.

"The mother, Lorraine, is not doing very well," Clara said. It felt disloyal, to say it out loud. Superst.i.tion. She was as bad as anyone.

Paul Tippett looked sad, the clear lines of his face blurred. She was sorry, because she liked him, as far as she knew him. He seemed crippled by diffidence, but always kind.

"Will you do something for me?" she asked. "Will you visit her?" She could see him pull away involuntarily, like she had pulled away from Darlene's s.n.a.t.c.hing hand. "Tomorrow, I mean, or-not as a parishioner, to comfort her-but I've got her children, and her husband's gone-oh, but don't tell her that. Just to ease her mind, that I'm not a monster, because she has no choice, she has to put them somewhere, and I'm the only-" Clara stopped. She was making a fool of herself.

He stared at her, in the lowered light of the night hall. "The husband has gone?"

"Yes," she said, not mentioning the car, or the teapot, or his weak threat. "But he might come back."

Paul thought Clara Purdy had experienced a radical change since he'd last seen her. She seemed charged with energy. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. It was involvement that put you into time, perhaps. He shook his head, astonished at the brightness of her face, then saw that she thought he was refusing her request.

"No, no-I will," he said quickly. "I will visit her. Sorry, I was thinking of something else. I'll tell her how fortunate her family is, to be with you."

He couldn't remember her house. A bungalow. "You have enough room for all of them, do you? What's her last name?"

"Gage. Lorraine Gage-in this ward."

He wrote it in his little calendar book and gave her a quick apologetic smile, for his reluctance. She could not help smiling back. She did like him. Too bad about Mrs. Tippett, that cold fish.

Lorraine lay in bed counting money. Seventy-seven dollars in the glove compartment. Lucky sevens. Three twenties, a ten, a five, the $2 bill saved for years. Wh.o.r.e's money, Clayton would call that. Not loose, for anyone to find (meaning Clayton, of course), but stuck between the back two pages of the map book. They were not going to get to Newfoundland or Labrador. $189 left in the bank, but she thought Clayton probably had her bank card, and he knew her PIN. A hundred dollars-one $100 bill-hidden, taped inside a box of tampons in the cardboard box in the trunk. He would not have found that, but the worry was that someone might throw out the box.

She could hardly stand to think about money. What would Clayton do? He had $300 and some left on the Husky Gas card before it maxed out. But no car, so gas wasn't going to do him much good. They could eat, though, at Husky station restaurants. If he decided to take the kids on to Fort McMurray, which she wondered if he was planning on doing, since he was obviously not at Clara's any more.

$189, $300, how long would that last?

At a certain point every time in all this figuring, Lorraine would feel her neck stiffen and swell from tension, and she'd fling the whole thing out of her mind.

She lay still, mostly. Moving made her feel weird, and whatever drugs she was pumped full of seemed to make it easier to be still. If things were ordinary, she'd be in the car, Pearce nestled in her elbow, worrying about money and thinking ahead to what work she could get in Fort McMurray. Worrying about who would look after the kids while she waitressed or cleaned houses again; about gas and how much a bunch of bananas and some fig newtons had taken out of the purse. She moved her feet under the pale green sheet and stared with torn-open eyes around the room. Here she was.

The moon made bars of yellow light that gradually drifted across the room. She could tell she must have slept when she saw the moonlight farther advanced on her sheets, on the end of the bed, on the wall. The moon rose in the east and set in the west, just like the sun. Sometimes with the sun. She'd sat nursing Pearce in the car while the others ate outside in the sun at a Taco Bell, last week. His mouth pulling, pulling, his eyes staring at her in a trance of happiness, and the white moon visible in the blue day sky.

She could not die on them. $77, $189, $100. It took her a few minutes to work it out in her foggy head. $366. Well, that was a lucky number. She liked threes and sixes. Clayton couldn't feed them all on that for long. He'd have to go to the food bank. Mom Pell had money somewhere, but she wouldn't give it up for food, at least not for the kids. Lorraine let herself hate Mom Pell for the cherries she'd insisted on buying, that huge six-dollar bag of BC cherries that had probably caused the whole thing, anyways. Making Clayton drive too fast to make up for stopping. Bits of red pulp clinging to everything after the crash, like your own body and brains turned inside out, like one of the children had been badly hurt. Lorraine's chest ached, the b.r.e.a.s.t.s and the inside too, wanting to have Pearce and the others there with her. She was filled with panicky rage just thinking about Clay and Mom Pell, but the children were so sweet. Except there was no money.

$77, $189, $100. How long did it take for welfare to kick in last time? But they weren't residents of Saskatchewan, they'd get sent back to Winnipeg on the bus. They couldn't leave her, though, and she was ent.i.tled to health care anywhere in Canada, they were always saying.

They needed $1200. Six for an apartment, another six for the damage deposit. First and last months' rent. Who knew how long it would take for Clayton to get paid, no matter how fast he found a job. There was no way. They'd be in housing, if there was room. Or a shelter. Clayton would not be good at looking after the kids on his own in a shelter, and Mom Pell was worse than useless. She would have to talk to the kids. They'd need some kind of-the thought of a weapon for them: a nail file, a pin- Lorraine sat up and vomited neatly into a green plastic kidney basin. She lay back down. It might all be a dream. The moon had floated off, leaving the room dark and deserted. In a while, she slept.

5. The Dart.

It was impossible, being with these children. After four days of it Clara was exhausted by their clatter and the grime that attended them, and their easy a.s.sumption that she would do everything for them. The cooking alone never seemed to end. The perpetual low-grade noise started at dawn with Pearce waking up, and might have been the worst thing-but Clara wasn't sleeping anyway, too conscious of everyone else, of the new disturbing ma.s.s of people surrounding her. There was far too much to do in the house, keeping any kind of order, but they had to deal with the car, too, and she'd promised.

Darlene was eager to press the elevator b.u.t.tons and fly up to her mother's room. But as they came closer she seemed to be repelled, as if the poles had suddenly reversed on her interior magnet. She took Clara's hand, three or four doors away, and whispered, "Wait."

Clara stopped. Darlene didn't look at her. She stared at the wooden rail that ran along the wall.

"I guess this is for people who are walking but might fall down?"

"I think so." Clara was frightened by how dire everything seemed, when she thought of things from Darlene's perspective. Or Lorraine's. "It'll be all right," she said, inanely.

Darlene let go of Clara's hand, and walked past the last few doors to Lorraine's room.

Lorraine was sitting up in bed when they went in. "Hey, sugar plum," she said. Her eyes were over-bright, her skin palely glowing.

"Mama," Darlene said. She was across the room instantly, leaning up on the bed, close to Lorraine's face. Their two faces pressed together, cheeks and noses, their whole faces, not just kisses. Lorraine's arms met around Darlene's back, and she lifted her up onto the high bed with her as if she didn't weigh anything.

"Oh, I'm so glad to see you!" she said, as well as Clara could make out, the words m.u.f.fled in Darlene's hair.

Darlene did not speak, she only lay curled against her mother on the green sheets, her arm over her mother's waist.

"You look good," Clara told Lorraine, when she looked up and noticed her.

"I better look good, I'm on twenty different pills." Lorraine waved at the rolling table, where three or four paper cups held an a.s.sortment of coloured pills. "Six, seventeen, everything I need right here."

She bent again, curling lightly over Darlene's tense back. "Mmm, you smell good. Clean laundry, I love that smell."

Watching the hard work Lorraine was having to do, to be as healthy as possible for Darlene, Clara felt a painful tension herself. And Darlene was so quick to pick up on things.

"Hey, Clara brought me this nice nightie, gives me a little colour, don't you think?"

Darlene looked up at her mother's face, still not speaking. No colour in Lorraine's face, only the brilliant darkness of her eyes. She hugged Darlene close, rocking in a narrow range, back, forth, back, forth.

Clara went outside and stood to the right of the door where they could not see her. She studied the wooden handrail, remembering her own mother-for some reason remembering her as a young woman in a grey dress with a white collar. Standing at the foot of the front porch steps, waiting for Clara's father to come down and take them to church. A hat on her head, one of those little bands you had to pin on, grey velvet. Her dimpling cheek, smiling at Clara's father, her wide, childish, heartbreaking mouth. She missed her mother so badly. Impossible as she was.

When Clara went back into the room they both looked at her sideways. They'd been talking in low voices, and for the first time she saw a resemblance between Darlene and her mother. The broad planes of their cheeks, and their eyes, with well-defined corners and dark line of brows. Their bodies, too, their strong open shoulders and the same narrowness across the back.

"I'll go down and get some juice," she offered, but Lorraine said not to leave. "I'm just telling her where things are-it's no big secret any more, we got to get the stuff out before they crush it or whatever."

"Oh, I'm sure they won't do that until..." Until the insurance investigators were through with it, she meant, but Lorraine ran over her words.

"I want Darlene to get the stuff, it'll ease my mind." Her voice was flat, almost rude-fever burning civility away.

Clara took a notebook from her purse and wrote down: pillow.

Lorraine talked directly to Darlene, giving her the job. "In the glove compartment, I want the map book. The registration and insurance. My box from the trunk. The kitchen box and the duffle bags-you can take those to Clara's place, if she's got a garage or somewhere to stash them?" Clara nodded. Lorraine turned her gaze back to Darlene. "Okay, for a while, until we figure out where you guys are going next, while we're working on first and last month's rent."

Darlene looked at Clara. Clara did not know exactly how to interpret the look. Was she asking Clara not to tell about Clayton being gone? Or considering whether, or when, Clara planned to throw them out of the house?

Lorraine nodded, and Darlene slid down off the bed, obedient to some understood command. She went into the bathroom and shut the door.

"I wanted to ask you about that," Lorraine said, making an effort to sit up straighter. The debt racking up was too much to bear, she wanted to scream and throw Clara out of the room. "About the next few days..."

She couldn't get it out properly, and it seemed like time was speeding, contracting.

"I know we've got to get the kids out of your hair."

"I'm happy to keep the children," Clara said. "The family. As long as they need a place to stay."

"I don't have enough money to pay you," Lorraine said as baldly as she could, to cut through all those words of Clara's.

"No, no! Don't-" Clara said.

"We're lucky to have the chance, lucky you're being so kind." Lorraine said. She could not bring herself to mention the shelter, the nail file, the need to train Darlene to fend people off of both her and Trevor-she pressed her fingers into her eye sockets, under the brow bone, to get rid of those thoughts.

"It's not kind," Clara was saying. Lorraine could hear her getting all chokey.

"You might be doing it from guilt or something, but it's kind, you're good," Lorraine said, dismissing all that bulls.h.i.t. "Darlene, you finished in there?"

The door popped open, and Darlene came in her quick, sidling way back to the bed. She didn't meet Clara's eyes.

Clara felt weighed down by the burden of obligation that all this was putting on everyone. If she was a better person she would be able to lift all that, say how happy she was to have company in the house, to have them. Her mother could have done it. All she could do was stop herself from false joviality. She closed her notebook and picked up her purse.

"We'd better get going, then."

"Good," Lorraine said. She closed her eyes. Not interested, for the moment, in obligation or grat.i.tude or convention.

Darlene put her cold fingers on her mother's eyelids, and went with Clara to the hall.

Before heading for the impound lot Clara stopped for lunch at a little rundown cafe, because Darlene said "How about there?" Darlene had chicken soup and Clara sat watching, unable to eat for the great lump that pity had jammed into her throat. Darlene's arms were trembling by the time the soup came, her hand shaking her spoon. It looked like good soup, at least. Darlene's arms were too thin. That tank top was not fit to wear. She needed sleeves to stay warm, even in July. The sharp bones were almost visible under her skin, making her seem insubstantial, but also strong. Clara hoped that was how children looked who were naturally thin. Lorraine was thin, but was that natural, or because of her illness? Mrs. Pell was built like a propane tank, a little head and a big squat body. Darlene did not look like she could ever become that. She'll have to be strong, Clara thought. She asked, "Is the soup good?"

Darlene nodded. She said, as if further to the soup, "There's a girl in Trimalo, where we lived, whose mother died. She was run over by a car, so it wasn't the same."