Blood Secrets Read online

  “And why is that?” he says.

  “Because I’m an artist.”

  “So, you are an artist,” he states. “And you like pain.”

  “I don’t like pain. I don’t go looking for it, but I tolerate it well enough. And I’ve gotten this far without any scars at all,” she says, knowing that although she may never see him after this strange new hour of a new millennium, this is a challenge. She’s aware of the white expanse of her winter skin. She sees him considering what she has told him.

  “Everyone has a scar somewhere.”

  “Well, maybe one. See these little teeth marks under my lip?” She pulls her lip up with her teeth as he leans in closer. “I was jumping on my bed when I was four years old and I jumped too high. My teeth went right through when I landed on the floor. But I don’t remember it happening at all.” She pauses, watching him smile at her.

  “It’s a wonderful quality. That forgetfulness,” he said.

  “So you see, I won’t scar. I promise,” she says, putting one hand over her heart. This gesture is the turning point, she will recognize years later. Feeling her heart beating under her hand is the moment when a strange little incident takes on its own momentum. Even then, she knows she is a fool. But looking around her, she also feels an irresistible need to go with the momentum, to take a chance on what fate has cast onto her path.

  She fixes this moment in her memory, certain that now that she is aware of her own power, it will always belong to her. She is still almost young, sitting among the Orbis backrests shrouded in plastic, next to a vat of canes and a carrel display of reading glasses and chains. All around them are reminders of decrepitude, deterioration, but she feels full of energy. The edges of everything in the drugstore are backlit with a cool metallic light, dim yet potent. Crowds of strangers still stream past the dark windows, unable to see in.

  Heart of Blue, Glowing

  JOYCE ALWAYS CAME HOME from the hospice with a list of names in her pocket, even though she had found that names didn’t matter much there. From week to week, the names changed, as they were expected to, even though the room numbers, one to eight, stayed the same. Old-fashioned names, ready to come into popular circulation again: Dorothy, Grace, Daniel, Sarah, Isaiah, Daisy, Joe, shifting from generation to generation as if carried on the wind.

  Today two candles remained lit by the nurses’ station, as they were for 24 hours after a death, and two new patients had already arrived by ambulance. The flames flickered each time someone passed by, two little hearts beating from all the activity of the two nurses and two volunteers on duty. The settling-in period was always a busy one for volunteers who had more time for listening than the nurses. And the families were usually distraught.

  Joyce heard a commotion even before she finished writing down names.

  “Joyce, can you check in on Isaiah and his family?” the nurse said.

  “Sure,” she called back, although she didn’t yet know which room held Isaiah. She followed the sound.

  She stepped around the screen in room five. Three women were filling up the room, all tall, all in their thirties. They seemed to be having an argument about art.

  “Washed out faux-impressionism. You can’t expect him to look at that all day,” one of the women said. She was straight-backed and pierced with silver through her eyebrow, and carried herself with the upward tilt to her jaw of a woman who was used to being looked at. Her hands braced the frame of a painting, ready to lift it off the wall.

  “Give it a rest, George. He’s not here on a fellowship. Do you think he cares?” The woman who said this was sitting at the end of his bed. She held herself with the same erect carriage but was dressed in a navy skirt and pale blue sweater.

  “He cares! His life is art,” George said. Without acknowledging Joyce, she passed the painting of lily pads into her hands.

  “This is not the time,” the third woman said. She was more tentative than her sisters, gazing down at the small figure in the bed.

  Joyce looked at the man too, who seemed to be sleeping. He was thin, probably exhausted from the transition from hospital to this room where he would soon die. He was probably eating very little at this stage. His skin was translucent, smoky-coloured, beautiful, like old polished wood. The calm sculptural quality of him was reinforced by the static of conflict in the room.

  “He wouldn’t want this,” George insisted.

  “How do you know what he wants? Where have you been all year?”

  She ignored this, flicking her hand at the painting Joyce was now holding in her hands. This transfer had taken place without Joyce quite noticing how. Not wanting to make any move that would seem to be taking sides, Joyce stood by quietly. “How can you stand to watch people die?” a friend had asked her. But she felt that what she did here was watch people live, a vivid strange time in their lives, full of dreams and memories, the undercurrents of their family intensifying, time breaking down between past and present. Often the families were harder to watch than the patient, maybe because there would not be any foreseeable relief.

  George’s voice brought her back. “Not visual pablum. I can tell you that. He’s an artist.”

  “Right now, he’s a sick man,” the woman sitting on the bed said. “What he needs is for us to get along. At this late date.”

  “He should have his own paintings around him. Representational art is dead.”

  “Fine choice of words.”

  Joyce thought the moment had come to say something.

  “I wondered if there is anything I can do for you or your father to help settle in?” She hoped she had guessed correctly at the family relationship.

  “You’re doing it,” George said. “You’re going to carry that awful painting right out of the room.”

  One of the other women hissed at her, “Do you have to be so rude? My God.”

  “What’s your name?” George said, and Joyce reluctantly told her, not wanting to be drawn in to the personal dynamic between the women.

  “Joyce,” George said as though she had known her for years. “You tell me. Is this painting a cliché or what?”

  “It’s a matter of taste,” Joyce replied. “Some people might find the colours soothing.” She noticed the tension in her voice, as though she was defending her own paintings. What would George have to say about her watercolour hung in the hallway—indigo buntings against fresh snow. Joyce had donated it before she decided to become a volunteer.

  “And some people might be put to sleep,” George retorted, and laughed. “Just like a dog.”

  “I can’t stand it. Stop it. Just, stop it,” the quiet one said.

  Joyce moved closer to one of the paintings on the wall, and then she understood what the problem was with George. She could smell liquor and desperation, stale sweat, contradicting her haughty authority.

  LAST WINTER, she had first come to this hospice with Ferrall, who used to personally deliver medications from his pharmacy on Friday nights when his drivers were off duty. At the time, she saw this as a sign of his sensitivity, a little act of chivalry that helped to justify how she was deceiving her husband. But once he had gone through the door and left her alone for what often turned into a long time, she felt closed out of his life, and increasingly closed off from her own family.

  She sat in his car in the parking lot, waiting as the car grew colder and colder and the windows steamed over from her breath. She cleared the glass from time to time and water with the consistency of tears gathered and rolled slowly down, distorting the lights from the low building blocking out the frozen river that she knew was there at the end of the garden. He had forgotten to leave her the keys so she could warm up and she felt that first flare of irritation. Where was he? But she wouldn’t have thought of entering the hospice, which was part of his other life, any more than she could imagine him walking through her front door at home.

  Once she saw a patient in a wheelchair, swaddled in a too-large jacket and a handmade quilt, smoking at a summer
patio table. Joyce hadn’t wanted to look too closely at the fragile form. In the pit of her stomach she felt a kick, and thought of Ruth. Her daughter had become dangerously thin last winter, before Joyce left home. Ruth would sit in the living room wrapped in her old baby blanket, with her dark-circled eyes and pointy bones, staring into space. Planting herself in the centre of the household, wanting to make sure her mother noticed.

  Joyce couldn’t believe a whole year had passed and so much had changed. Colin and Ruth went on without her, and Ruth’s health returned. At the time, she wouldn’t have been able to admit it, but in the months since living on her own she had come to realize that she had closed herself off from Ruth for much longer than the year she had been gone. She had chosen her own body’s needs over her daughter’s and she would pay for this for the rest of her life. In the meantime, she was caught in this in-between world, not with them, but not yet anywhere else.

  Ferrall was gone from her life too, sooner than she would have thought, and she found herself walking by the hospice fairly often without understanding why. She donated a painting and soon after made an appointment to inquire about volunteering.

  The nurse who had interviewed her asked, “Why do you want to do this?”

  Joyce didn’t know consciously what to say but knew that she must be absolutely honest.

  “Because I’ve lost people I love. And it doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”

  She was surprised at her answer, hadn’t thought of it before now.

  “Your parents?”

  “In a way,” Joyce said, hearing the avoidance in her own voice.

  “I have a difficult relationship with my mother. It’s going to be very hard for me when her time comes.” Once again, Joyce was surprised by how true this was.

  “How will this help?” the nurse asked.

  “I will learn what I can give and how. At least the process of dying will be familiar.”

  “Is your father alive?” The nurse asked.

  “Yes, but I’m not in touch with him.”

  The nurse waited.

  “My parents divorced many years ago.”

  “What about you? Do you have a family?”

  “I’m separated.”

  “Children?”

  “One, a daughter who is seventeen now. She lives with her father.”

  “So you’re still actively mothering.”

  She wondered about this phrase, whether she was still mothering. Or was she actively absent the way her own mother had been?

  The nurse seemed to pick up on her thoughts and asked, “Is your separation recent?”

  “Not too recent,” she answered. Again, the nurse waited.

  “But unexpected. I never thought I would be on my own at this stage in my life.”

  “Many people who find themselves here as patients feel the same way,” she said. “Would you say that you’re still grieving?”

  “Probably. I’m a little disoriented. I guess I need to learn how to let go, and also how to live in a different way.”

  She was sure that she would be rejected on the basis of what she had said, that her reasons were too tainted with personal failure. But the nurse was saying that she admired the painting Joyce had donated months before and was glad to meet the person who had created it. Then they talked about aloneness and human connection and aging.

  Finally, the nurse said, “Your reasons are not so uncommon. Helping people through the last stage of life can be a spiritual experience for everyone. But, you’ll see the opposite too. Family dynamics become exaggerated. If something strikes too close to home, you’ll have to recognize that and take care of yourself. You won’t be a help to anyone if you’re wrestling with your own ghosts.”

  So she took a course, every Wednesday night for three months, conscientiously reading from the book list, Final Gifts, What Dying People Want, and still knew nothing. But she did learn the proper way to lift and bathe someone too weak to hold themselves up, how water can be thickened for people who have trouble swallowing, that the best she could do for someone was attentive listening, with little of her own life offered in return. She had taken the lessons to heart. She had tried to empty herself of desire. She tried to take people exactly as they were, without judgment or expectations. And the way they accepted her presence, without judgment, seemed the greatest gift. Before long, she gave up her name, feeling no need to introduce herself when she entered someone’s room. Only her humanness was relevant.

  It was a coincidence that she ended up working on Friday nights. The weekend shifts were harder to fill, and being an artist who worked on her own time, she could fit in anywhere without difficulty. She saw Ferrall from a distance a couple of times. He just waved casually. Every time she saw him, he was leaning against the counter talking to the receptionist. Often he would still be there the next time she walked down the corridor to escort a visitor back to a room or retrieve a drug delivery. It was like they had never known each other.

  Those cold nights she had waited for him in the car, she had assumed that he was being consulted about medications. She used to imagine him with his hand on someone’s head, just as he had ministered to her on the night she met him. It was a surprise to realize that he’d probably forgotten about her waiting in his car outside.

  WHEN SHE NEXT ENTERED Isaiah’s room, she was almost assaulted by the paintings on the walls. Instead of the usual floral watercolours, the walls gave the impression of leaning, almost toppling, from the weight of huge canvases hung around the bed. They were fiercely abstract, crackling scarlet beneath bands of black, harsh whites and queasy yellows like the colour of the sky before thunderstorms. She recognized the style, should have known him from his name. The paintings were violently passionate and masculine.

  Isaiah was lying on his side, with a pillow propping him and was absolutely still so she couldn’t tell if he was awake until she walked around his bed. He smiled vaguely when she said hello. She had been briefed about the ongoing arguments between his three grown daughters, all within two years of age, all with different mothers. George was the youngest and was responsible for mounting his paintings on the walls. She had lived the longest with their father growing up, even if it only amounted to a year or two more than Savannah, who worked for the government. Jill, the silent sister, hadn’t lived with him at all. The three sisters were in the family lounge with the door closed. They had been disturbing the other patients.

  She looked around the room once Isaiah had acknowledged her presence and said, “Your paintings are powerful. So full of energy.” She didn’t tell him that she had seen them before at the gallery.

  He just gazed at her without responding. His irises were brown, or maybe hazel, darkened with countless specks of dark brown, giving his eyes an eerie cognition.

  “I brought you a glass of juice,” she said, and he nodded and gestured for her to sit.

  “Would you like some wine? Just wait a minute and I’ll get you a glass,” he said so softly she had to lean forward. He was trying to lift his head off the pillow.

  “Thank you. But I’m fine,” she said, drawn in by his hospitable ways.

  She pulled her chair closer to the bed and angled the straw into his mouth. His big hand came up and touched her hand as she held the glass. He concentrated and it took a minute before she saw that fluid had lifted as far as his lips. His skin was dry and almost scorchingly hot. She was moved by the way heat raged in the bodies of many at the end of life, as though the people inside were in a hurry to spend it all, burn it all, like the fiery end of chlorophyll. After a few minutes, he ran out of strength and let the straw fall.

  They sat then, looking at each other, candidly.

  “I admire these paintings. They are yours, aren’t they?” And she looked behind her to see what he saw from his position in the bed. Once again, she almost gasped at the force of the painting hung there, sharp grey glinting through the bruised blue as though metal had been embedded in the canvas.

  “Wh
at’s this painting called? Do you name your paintings, or give them numbers, like so many abstract painters do? Like Study in Blue, No. 2.”

  Once again he ignored what she had said and continued to look at her. She considered telling him that she painted as well, but before she said anything, the importance of this slipped away. His daughters had been trying to keep him connected to what had most strongly identified him in life, and she would be doing the same.

  She held his gaze, knowing that his eyes were probably the least changed. She didn’t look at the bony arms or shrunken shoulders although she wanted to glance down at his hands, so beautiful and precise and generous in size were they now that their bone structure was revealed.

  He said something to her that she couldn’t catch. His voice was low and loose, as though he was having a chuckle under his breath.

  “I’m sorry. I missed that,” she said.

  He pointed to a stack of National Geographic magazines on his side table and said, “At the bottom. He’s at the bottom.”

  She rifled through and he made a sound when she found the torn page beneath the stack. It was a photograph of a terrier sitting on a freshly mowed lawn, looking up at the camera with bright eyes and an eager dog’s smile. The white fur on the dog’s chest was springy, almost electrified with brushing.

  “That’s a good boy,” he said, and chuckled. “He’s a good dog.”

  “Did you have a dog like this one?” She knew it couldn’t be a photo of his own dog because of the jagged edge where it had been ripped out of a magazine.

  “He’s not mine.” He paused, suddenly sad, gazing at the photo she had smoothed on his tray. He pulled the tray closer. She waited because she could tell he had more to say.

  “Do you think you could get a frame?” He said this softly, almost under his breath.

  “You want to frame this picture?” she asked.

  “I asked the girls, but they do what they want.” This he said with some bitterness. “Could you bring me a frame? Just a cheap one. I don’t care.”

  “I’ll mention it to your daughters.”