Part 22 (1/2)

”Not bad,” Clary said. ”You could try it out.”

She pulled the rat-tail down another line of scalp and divided off another strand of hair. Another, and another. No lice to be found. The sun shone on them, as warm as you could expect, that late in the year.

31. Potlatch.

Paul was having a party. Urgent papers all over his desk: the sermon, the call to giving. But every Christmas since his ordination, against Lisanne's yearly protest, he had held a parish party at his house on December 6th, early enough that no other party conflicted. The Feast of St. Nicholas. He had a fondness for that narrow, looming, eaves-dropping, purse-tossing, pickle-barrel bishop. Old Nick, the devil's name. Saints and demons, rewards and punishments...He could not drift off into consideration of devils and their place in the pantheon, because he was tied down to earth, to the calendar, December 6. He flung his hands up in the air, smacked them down on the strewn papers, and went home.

On the kitchen table, surrounded by cookbooks-Lisanne had forgotten those-he made a list. Chili? the heading said, and underneath, things that matched, for a good, frugal party. Then he drew a thick zig-zag through it. n.o.body likes chili. Tourtiere, for Christmas. Cinnamon sticks, eggnog, spruce boughs. His mother had always made white fruitcake, at the last minute. The battered sc.r.a.pbook of recipes fell open as it always did to the splattered card in Binnie's handwriting, Current Biscuits, with her squiggly drawing of herself: a long-haired girl waving at him, electric eyebrows surprised. He would make biscuits too.

Clary would come, with the children and Darwin. Unless he was at the hospital. These days Lorraine was fluttering through the engraftment period like a pale moth, waiting for Darwin's stem cells to be accepted by her body and begin to proliferate, cells riffling through her in cascading, exponential, astronomical multiplication. They'd said several weeks, but n.o.body had told Paul how many several was. Maybe they did not know. Lorraine was under restricted access until it had settled, so he had not visited her lately. Even when the engraftment was successful (he phrased it that way carefully in his head), the onset of graft-versus-host disease would be the dangerous time. He had e-mailed the doctor he'd become friends with during Binnie's illness, to find out what to expect, and Julian had replied quickly: GVHD can kill patients from overwhelming multisystem organ failure. The balance is to have engraftment with a little GVHD (which is difficult to control). Other scenario is horrible, which is no engraftment, leaving patient with no marrow function. Usually a terminal situation...

How much of all this did the children know, or Clary? He hated having that knowledge, the long unwinding tapestry of Binnie's life, and illness, and death. Doctors must find some way of carrying that contagious experience.

Darwin did all right with it, most of the time, but one night he had come banging on Paul's door at 2 a.m., drunk and miserable. That was the benefit of being single again: he could pull Darwin in and drink with him, listen to him rage against illness and death, and put him to bed in the spare room without having to consult or appease Lisanne.

Lisanne's lawyer had served the papers. Before vestry meeting on Tuesday night Paul had been climbing the steps of the church when a young man came up to him, looking like he might need a handout, and then slapped a sheaf of papers at Paul, crying ”You're served!” on a reedy note of triumph. You're It!

No amount of delay would change any of it. He would remortgage the house, give her half, halve the RRSPs...The division of spoils was not complicated. Lisanne had bought a bright red car. She was marrying an editor. He had to a.s.sume that she had been sleeping with him for some time. You couldn't change horses in mid-gallop unless the other was saddled and ready, tlot-tlotting along beside you like the highwayman's horse, ready for Bess the landlord's daughter, the landlord's black-haired daughter, to jump over, Red Rover. Her black hair flying, a sudden laugh cracking open her face, reaching toward the other, with joy.

He would make fruitcake. Curried shrimp. Yule logs. Lark's tongues.

The kitchen was empty and cold, December clawing in under the back door. Paul put on his coat and went to shop for plates and candles, and a draft-excluder. Christmas crackers. A new cover for the duvet.

Darwin lay on Lorraine's bed, curled over her feet, almost fetal. She had been out for a long time this time; coming back to the surface was weirdly difficult. Like swimming up to the starry glittering border between out and in. If she let herself, she would slip back down and be lost in blueness, wavering down to black. Darwin's arm across her ankles was anchoring her here. Or she might be dreaming him. Dreaming the bed.

She had got used to this. In the morning they were going to start giving her something different-she had forgotten. They were so careful to tell her what was happening, and so distinct, removed from her. That border lay between her and them-they were in, she was out still, still out in the blue, not well. Dying, it was possible, possible. She had to rally because she was not yet allowed to go, she had three children. She could breathe, still, she could keep breathing slowly and calm down, not be afraid, most of the time she could.

The afternoon slant of the light had not changed for hours, but it must have, it must have. This must be some other afternoon. Darwin was asleep in the chair. Look at that, he never was asleep when she was awake. He was the chain back up from her to the kids and he would not let go. She drifted to Clayton, wondering without any effort where he was, what he was doing, why he was not her anchor and never had been, but she was his. So long since she had thought of him, of what he had found to do. How he was surviving, without her or the kids to hold him steady. Clayton? she called to him through the water. Are you okay?

He would hear her, he would dream of her, or think about her while he did whatever he was doing. She could see him walking down the street, a sad body going along, slanting back while going forward, because he never wanted to be doing whatever he was doing, poor Clayton. Some square of her heart was perpetually sorry for him-it was distracting her from curing this. She had to stop that.

She fell through the ocean for a while, not knowing the word for deep. Darwin's hand moved and pulled the sheet taut over her feet and made her s.h.i.+ft under the sheet, he was pulling her back in, reeling her in again, up again into the air. It was easier to stay down but Darwin was right, she had to come up and open her eyes-the lights were on. It was darker, finally, some time must have gone by, some part of the day or evening. She had gone through another day and could float. Clayton's boat Irresolute, drifting somewhere in the fog and ice.

Paul shut the lid on a trunkful of booze, an elephant snootful. Bill Haywood had been at the liquor store at the same time, buying a specially selected case of superior red wines. Paul felt poor and young-when would he ever buy a case of wine? Two 24s of beer, two bottles of white, two red, a vodka and a Scotch, and he was out of money. This divorce business was expensive. He shrugged that off. He had room on his credit card. He would spend it all on the party if he wanted to. After decades of dry frugality, Paul felt a growing desire for profusion or purge, the need to blow everything, fill the hollow s.p.a.ce with pleasure and vengeful excess. Before the lawyers divided their a.s.sets, he would have some use of all the years of penny-pinching. He told himself that this was a common expression of sorrow, a reasonable part of the grieving process for the marriage. Whatever, his squalling monkey-mind shot back. More!

He put twenty dollars into a panhandler's cup. He was an idiot, a broken man, attempting to stave off soul-hunger and beat back the intimidation of solitude with the consolation of philanthropy.

At the butcher shop-he'd never been in there before, far too expensive-he bought a huge sirloin tip. They told him how to roast it so he could serve it cold. A ham, too; then he spent two hundred dollars in the grocery store on olives and chips-every fancy treat he'd ever fancied. He could see the festive sideboard filling, and it fed an appet.i.te he'd never had before: an overwhelming need for potlatch. Everybody was dying, or already dead, or leaving other people, and the year was dying into winter, and the only thing to do was make some noise.

Dolly was allowed to go to Ann's after school. Ann's mother had finally called back. She was a strange, dim woman, like a flashlight with the batteries almost run down. But she had said she'd pick the girls up from school, and Clary had agreed. It was an adventure, to be going to someone's house. Ann had told Dolly stories about her family, mostly made up. But if she made weird stuff up then there was other, real stuff going on. Dolly knew that Clary had meant to look Mrs. Hayter over before she let her go there, but Pearce was sneezing and crying with a little cold, so Clary was not as picky as she might have been. Mrs. Hayter looked okay, anyway, in a plain navy coat with her grey van, a special-edition one with swirly paint on the sides.

Clary told Mrs. Hayter she would pick Dolly up at suppertime, and they went off in different directions, Dolly and Ann driving away in the leather-seated van with the sunroof and the television in the back seat. The leather was really dirty, and the TV didn't work any more, Ann said. It was missing the on/off k.n.o.b and there was something crusted on one side of the screen. Ann's mother didn't pick up Ann's brothers, they came home on the bus from the high school, but they weren't home yet. Dolly was a little scared of the idea of them, plus Ann did not talk about them much, which made Dolly think they were probably trouble. Ann's mother went right to her room when they got home, without saying anything.

Ann took Dolly into the kitchen and went through the disorganized pantry closet looking for a snack, but all she found was broken crackers. She said, ”Want to look at my Barbies?”

But Dolly didn't want to bother with Barbies, they were childish and boring. Instead, with a kind of pride, Ann led her to her father's den in the bas.e.m.e.nt, to a big black chest of drawers. In those drawers were flat arrays of dirty pictures. Dolly had seen Playboys before at houses where her mom cleaned, but these creeped her out totally, yucky black and white things with naked people fighting and other stuff, with masks on their faces-Dolly almost gagged.

She said, ”This is lame,” in a scornful voice that she knew would make Ann stop showing them to her. Ann was easy to boss. It was cold for playing outside, but they got their boots and coats on again and wandered around in the pink playhouse in the back yard, but it was dirty too and sharp with the stale winter smell of plastic. Dolly had nothing to say to Ann after looking at those pictures. They opened and closed the shutters for a while, and then Ann said they should go back inside. There wasn't anything to do out in the yard, anyway. Ann had her hand on the back doork.n.o.b when they heard a crash in the front hall, and two big boys yelling at each other.

Ann dropped her hand but stayed staring at the door.

Dolly said, ”I know!”

”What?” Ann's eyes never moved, even though she was listening to Dolly.

”Let's take the bus downtown and look at the Christmas decorations.”

”On the bus? By ourselves?”

Ann looked at Dolly then, a narrow blankness in her eyes like she was adding things up in her head. She looked in the window at the kitchen clock. ”Yeah, okay,” she said.

”Only we don't have any money,” Dolly said. ”We'd have to walk.”

”I hid five dollars in the playhouse,” Ann said. ”We can get down and back on that.”

She dug underneath the plastic window edging, and came away with the five dollars in her hand. They went out through the snowy back yard into the alley, down the alley to the street, and around the corner to c.u.mberland. It was only a block to the bus stop, and the bus came along pretty quickly. The driver didn't question them, but sighed when he gave Ann change.

It was the first time Dolly had ever been on a bus. The bus swung left at University and went piling along through the snow-slushed street, and all along the way Dolly knew the hospital was coming and looked, or didn't look; but no matter where her eyes went it was still there. She could get off and go in. They'd only stayed five minutes when Clary took her the last time, and she hadn't been allowed to hug her mother, only to wave at her from the doorway with scrubbed hands. She hadn't even dared to blow her a kiss in case germs went with it.

Ann started to cry. What did she have to cry about?

”What?” Dolly said. ”Are you scared?”

”My mom is going to kill me,” Ann said.

”Don't be stupid. We'll be home before she knows we're gone.” Dolly hoped that was true, because Clary was coming to pick her up at 5:30 and if she wasn't there, Clary would freak. But if they did get into trouble, she could phone and Clary would come get them, right away, no matter what was happening. She could say to people, I live with Clara Purdy. She was stronger in the world than Ann, not just from her ordinary brain but now also from Clary's place in the city.

They got off the bus downtown and zig-zagged on foot for blocks and blocks, trying to find decorations to look at other than the wreath-lights on the lampposts, but the only colour was neon until they found themselves at the decorated skating rink between the pine trees at the Bessborough Hotel.

Ann trailed behind Dolly, as if she'd never had an adventure in her life and never wanted one either. The skaters went around and around and Dolly let her eyes focus and unfocus on the swirl of black pants and bright jackets, like twirling on the little merry-go-round in the park by Clary's. A tall old man skated by, a moving castle, his legs big scissors, long and dark and straight. His skates seemed to go slow while they cut long skirls of ice.

Dolly was happy to stand and watch the skating, but Ann kept whining about the cold. Then an older teenage boy came over to talk to them. He was not skating, just hanging around the little cabin where the fire was. His nose was round and fleshy, and he stared too hard.

”Want some gum?” he asked, talking to Ann, not Dolly. He had thick lips like that bad John Reed guy in Jane Eyre.

Dolly couldn't believe it when Ann took a piece. Didn't she know anything?

”Want to go in the hotel?” he asked, still to Ann. ”I got a friend who works in the kitchen, we can get a snack.”

”Forget it,” Dolly said. She pulled Ann's arm, but Ann pulled back, like she wanted to stay talking to the guy. Not getting it at all. The boy turned his weird stare onto Dolly.

”You're ugly,” he said. ”But you can blow my friend.” He grabbed his crotch.

Dolly was scared, partly because he was wearing a lot of black eyeliner. She pulled Ann away onto the ice, thinking they could cross the rink to get to the road.

They flew inside the whirling circle of skaters, Christmas lights blinking between bodies and shadows like slides. Ann was heavy to pull, and Dolly's boots slid, useless on the ice. The weird boy's high Doc Martens had better traction. He was dodging between skaters to catch them. But the tall old man glided toward Dolly, long legs, long skateblades crossing, and swirled around her and crashed into the boy, who went down yelling on the ice. The old man was stooping to help the boy up, or to get in his way.