Blood Secrets Read online

  One of his father’s government friends, a woman about his age with intricately knotted reddish hair and the whitest pallor in the room, took him aside and asked him to show her how to say, “I’m sorry for your loss” in sign language. He saw her a few minutes later practicing clumsily in the corner, her back turned to the room, then showing several other people, who were even clumsier than she was. Somehow they lost the concept of “your loss” so that by the time they reached his mother, they were saying to her, “I’m sorry for you.” She greeted that with a frosty restrained smile. By that time, his mother had grown quite militant about being part of the deaf community and didn’t appreciate any suggestion that she was somehow disabled.

  SHE HAD BEEN TAKEN from her house quite suddenly when the stroke occurred three days before. She had managed to dial 911 and when she didn’t speak, they sent police and an ambulance. Although she must have wanted to be saved, she had not communicated with anyone since she was brought to the hospital. One nurse knew a little sign language, but his mother hadn’t responded. When paper and pen were put in her good hand, the one they knew was unaffected by the stroke, she drew irregularly shaped circles. When she drew perfect ovals, she smiled a lopsided smile that was not directed at the outside world. He had gotten to Glace Bay as fast as he could. Valerie had driven him to the airport that morning.

  “Do you have anything you want me to say to Mom,” he had asked her at the airport.

  “She’s never been able to hear me. That’s not going to change now,” she said, looking down at her still hands in her lap, as though suddenly embarrassed by how blunt she had been. But this forceful way of speaking had been part of what draw him to her. Then she turned and kissed him, whispering, “Godspeed.”

  He knew what she said was true. They had married urgently more than twenty-five years ago, when they were too young to care about either of their families attending. They were living across the country, in Edmonton, where they were graduate students. So much of their lives together revolved around talk, the witty banter of their friends, words lobbed back and forth like a tennis match. And talk was their livelihood. Both of them taught at the University; he in Classical Studies, Valerie in English Literature. Valerie in particular was a quick talker, a dynamic teacher, and had never gotten used to the telecommunicator they used over the telephone to keep in touch. Speaking slowly enough for the translation to appear on the screen at the other end of the line never came naturally to her. He knew, though, that what didn’t come naturally was his parents’ acceptance of her. His mother would have loved the term profoundly deaf if she had ever been able to hear it. For her, deafness was an inspired silence that gave her and others in her community a sensitivity to touch that Valerie could never be part of.

  HE HAD ONLY STAYED at his mother’s house in Glace Bay once before, just after she moved in almost ten years ago. Every other time he visited, she insisted that he stay in the hotel along the highway and he took her out to lunch, dinner, to Sydney to shop, spending very little time in her increasingly disorganized house. That first time he had stayed with her, it had still been uncluttered and full of echoes because she hadn’t yet put curtains up. As was their habit, she signed and he signed while talking out loud so it was only his own voice that he heard bouncing coldly off the unadorned walls. She had been excited by the move from Ottawa to Glace Bay, something that he couldn’t understand. The town was dilapidated, the commercial strip adorned with false 1940s two-storey fronts leaning precariously in the strong November gales. They had been put in place by a famous movie director years ago, when he made a film about his own years growing up in The Bay. Perhaps he had left them behind as a gift to the town’s rough-and-tumble past, but they were flimsy, temporary, and gave the town an even more down-at-the-heels look. Store fronts and two old wood churches were boarded up, with crows living in the belfries. The sea, which could be seen from his mother’s bedroom window, was muddy, brown cliffs crumbling, stained red in places as though they were leaking blood.

  “My mother would have a fit if she saw me living in one of the miner’s houses,” she signed to him. “We had a beautiful one on Main Street. I’ll show you.”

  They had walked there in the afternoon. The house stood close to what had become a busy road, its cedar shingles now painted the grey of the sea. It had once been grand, with a glassed-in porch. But the windows were dirty, the steps unpainted and flaking away. That was the feeling about the whole house, that it was tired of standing.

  A young woman came out of the front door and looked alarmed to see them standing on the front lawn near the place where the peonies had been. When she saw his mother signing, she backed up to move inside again.

  “My mother was born in this house,” he told the woman, hoping that she would offer to show them the inside.

  “I’ll get the owner,” she said and closed the door. A young blond man emerged with a shaved head.

  “Been here 8 months. Nothing’s changed since then,” he said, staring at his mother, then looking at him when he spoke. “The ceilings used to be high. But they redid them.”

  He knew then there was no point in going inside. It was apartments now, renovated in a cheap and ugly way. He asked the young man if he minded them going into the back. It was stark, devoid of trees, mostly a car park. But he could see that it had once been a beautiful garden. There were angles and nooks and corners. The carriage house was not painted grey, but had once been painted a peach colour that was mostly worn away.

  His mother signed to him quickly about the roses, lilacs and mock orange her mother had grown, the hammock in the summer, and the car with a rumble seat where you could feel the wind hit you in the face. She didn’t seem interested in looking inside, but he put his eye to the crack between two doors, drawing back when he was blinded by light. Walking around the back of the carriage house, he realized the whole back end was bashed in, wrecked.

  She led him around the side of the house and showed him the coal chute, unused now.

  “Blue smoke lifted from all the chimneys in the winter,” she told him. “Coal is very colourful. Black and shiny in the cellar. Crimson inside the furnace.”

  She told him that coal created her father’s livelihood although he never got his hands dirty. Coal brought the men and money, and they needed entertainment, so first he opened a Nickelodeon, and then a vaudeville theatre. She loved the animal acts the best, the dogs, wearing little suits and bowties, jumping through hoops. Then came the silent films. By then she could read and missed nothing, with her bare feet propped against the piano as her older sister played the accompaniment.

  “My father told me coal turned into diamonds. I thought I wasn’t reading his lips right, but then he told me how.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Press this long and hard enough and you’ll have diamonds. But the poor fool who lets it slip through his fingers will get nothing but a lungful of black dust.”

  “So did you try?”

  “I believed him. My father had a face like the best performers. You could read everything on the surface, or so you thought. I went down to the cellar and took a piece of coal to my room. I put it under the heaviest book in the house, the Oxford Dictionary. All night I thought of my coal lying under words I loved and words I hated and words I would never hear, even if I lived to be a hundred.”

  “And in the morning?” he asked, knowing the answer, but letting her finish the memory that was obviously so vivid.

  “I had a lump of coal and a dirty dictionary,” she signed, and laughed with her breath and eyes only. She had always refused to vocalize, even though it had been the philosophy of the more recent schools for the deaf to teach this technique.

  “The talkies came in after that and I couldn’t understand them as well. Then they decided I had to leave home. For school.”

  “That must have been hard. You were just a child.”

  “I missed them, but they needed to send me away.”

  “Does a
child understand that?”

  “Now I do. Because they let me go, I was able to go to Gallaudet University and meet your father. They gave me my own kind, my own life.”

  Then what was she searching for by returning to her childhood home? Her parents had been old when they had her, and they died more than half a century ago. Her sister had died a few years before. What did she hope to find? She seemed so excited about being home. Everywhere they walked in the small town, she was able to tell him what stood before, how things looked when she was a young child. Her visual memory was so vivid, the past seemed more real than the present.

  They went inside the theatre her father had built, and rebuilt more than once after a succession of fires. Each time, it reflected the age it was constructed in, ending its natural evolution as a derelict movie house that showed mostly Westerns and porn. But in the 1980s it had been taken over by the provincial government for its heritage value and returned to its 1920s glory days, a neoclassical performance space with plaster columns and elaborate ceiling designs. A red curtain framed a dramatic wide stage.

  “Yes, this is the same, but the colours are different,” she said. “The decor was gold and rose. And the stage curtain was painted with a scene from ancient Greece.”

  They were the only people there. Hard times had continued and there was little entertainment coming through town. The stage, when they climbed the stairs from the orchestra pit, was dark and dusty.

  WHEN HE ENTERED her house, where she had lived the last ten years of her life alone, he was shocked at how it had changed. What little furniture she had was old, mostly junk from second-hand stores, but the small house felt crowded. There were glass bottles everywhere, wine and spirit bottles stacked neatly under the bathroom sink, all along the walls. The inside wall that joined her home to the one next door was a solid mosaic of bottles stacked with their bottoms facing outwards. The sun was angling into the room and caught the glass wall, but dimly, since it had travelled the distance of the house. The glass lit up with dark jewel colours, quite beautiful, but he sensed that this collection had nothing to do with aesthetics. His mother must have been unwilling to discard the bottles along with her trash. He never before realized that she was sensitive to being talked about, as was inevitable all her life. She had refused to feel ashamed of her deafness, but a drinking problem was something else, something she wouldn’t want the town to whisper about, even though she couldn’t hear what they would be saying.

  The countertops, window ledges and tables were covered with stones she had gathered from the coves near her house. She favoured round stones, all sizes. Some were green as eyes, others red, striated with porous black layers. Some were black and looked as though a painter had dribbled white paint in thin lines on the surface. One stone was purple with blue flecks. There were hundreds, if not thousands of stones. The effect of the bottles and stones was of a home that was a snag of coastline, where detritus was washed to shore by storms. What am I going to do with these stones when she dies, he thought. The bottles he could throw away, but the stones she had chosen, one by one, for their beauty and had carried them here to keep her company. He couldn’t imagine hauling them in buckets to the cove and emptying them into the sea.

  He talked to the nurse before he sought out his mother in her room.

  “As the doctor told you on the phone, it’s hard to tell how much function she has. The scans look good but she’s unresponsive.”

  The nurse paused, and then added, “You do know about her complicating condition?”

  “Her deafness?” he said.

  “Of course you know about that,” she said and smiled at him. She was a lovely woman, middle-aged with dark Celtic eyes and pale skin. “I mean her drinking problem.”

  “I’d suspected.”

  “She had to be given Valium the first few days to control the tremors. That might have flattened her affect. But it’s also not unusual for people who’ve had strokes to be depressed. Does she have any family or friends here?”

  “Not that I know of,” he said, feeling like a terrible son to be so absent from his mother’s life.

  The nurse reached out and lightly touched his forearm.

  “That’s not that unusual either. Don’t be too hard on yourself.”

  Her touch released the tears in him and she gave him a minute before she took him to his mother’s room.

  His mother was lying in bed, washed out and pale as the sheets. Her hair had grown completely white since he’d last seen her. Or perhaps she had recently stopped colouring it. Strange, the things he didn’t know about her. He came close to the left side of the bed and held her hand, her dominant hand and, luckily, the hand unaffected by the stroke, but he wouldn’t have known this because it didn’t respond to his touch. Unless she turned her head and focused on him, there was no point signing. He looked through the window beside her bed and could see a curve of the town’s beach and the sea, riled up and steel-grey. He put his other hand on her forehead, stroked her hair back. She didn’t move or acknowledge him, didn’t look at him, so there was no opportunity to say what he had rehearsed. Still, he stayed the afternoon, quietly reading beside her bed.

  THE NEXT DAY, the heat was closer and more intense, more like what he remembered from his summers in Ottawa than a town on the cold north Atlantic. He walked downtown, passing the theatre on his right. He noticed that a new glass lobby had been built where there had been two boarded up stores, so that the theatre looked more expansive. The cramped doorway was gone. Some of the boarded-up churches were also gone, but hadn’t been replaced with anything new. They were vacant lots. He walked towards the chronic care home, but wasn’t ready to go in yet. He continued on, following the road until he came to the cemetery where his grandparents were buried. Many of the gravestones were so old they couldn’t be read. Old or new, they all faced inland, towards the town their descendents had left, turned away from the ocean that today was deep blue streaked with pea green, muddy near the cliffs.

  It took him almost an hour to find their graves. The first, a salt-white stone, glittered in the hot sun: Connor Handel, born August 12, 1876, died April 3, 1957. And next to him, a polished black stone, much smaller, but crowded with words: Sarah McPherson Handel, beloved wife of Connor Handel, born September 9, 1884, died July 23, 1957. She will be missed. Hands were carved below the dates, but not in the traditional prayer position. When he realized that the right hand, with its index finger pointing outward, formed part of the sign for always, he knew his mother had come here and arranged the stone for her mother. He only had a vague idea of when his grandparents had died and now he realized that it was almost a year after his birth in the spring. Neither of them had ever seen him, his mother had once said regretfully.

  There was a space beside the two graves. His aunt had been buried in Hamilton and he realized he was standing on the place where he would bury his mother, probably sooner than he’d imagined. Something had drawn her back to this place, something stronger than the memories she shared with his father. He would let her rest here.

  By the time he reached the care facility, his shirt was drenched with sweat and he was thirsty. He drank deeply at the water fountain as the nurse he had talked to the day before came by.

  “How are you?” she asked. He stood up and felt his head spin a little from his walk in the hot sun.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said. “You’re awfully pale.”

  “I think I have,” he said. “I went to my grandparents’ graves.”

  She smiled suddenly.

  “Your grandfather built the Savoy, didn’t he? As kids, we used to go to the Saturday afternoon Westerns.”

  “I never met him.”

  “Neither did I. He was long before my time, but I loved his photograph in the lobby. He looked so dashing with his thin mustache. We thought he must be famous. His portrait was signed just like a movie star’s.”

  “I just found out that I was born before they died.”

>   The nurse waited, giving him space.

  “My mother used to talk about how she wished they had had a chance to hold me. She was lying.”

  “You can’t know her reasons. Times were different then. People didn’t travel as much.”

  “She could have just told the truth.”

  “Maybe she was telling a kind of truth. Maybe she wished she had been there for them. Time can pass awfully quickly, especially with a new baby. Mostly we don’t know when it’s running out.”

  “How is she today?”

  “The same,” the nurse said. “She’s not communicating. I know a little sign language. She doesn’t respond. The strange thing is I put my head in to check on her while she was sleeping and she was signing. She must have been dreaming. At least we know now that she can move her right side.”

  She was still sleeping when he took a seat beside her bed. He put his hand on her forehead and smoothed her hair to let her know he was there, but she didn’t move. Her hands were quiet at her sides.

  He hadn’t brought a book, so he opened the drawer of the bedside table and took out the Bible. “In the beginning was the Word … ” he read. Yes, that was certainly true, even though sign language didn’t break down all meaning into discrete words. One person speaking with another through their bodies alone. How he began; how each person began. He thought that to speak this way is to be caressed, to be held in a nurturing cocoon. Then he became afraid of sounds they couldn’t hear: a siren one street over, a cat fight in the backyard, the crack in the ceiling of the house on the coldest nights in winter.

  Her lifted his eyes from the page he wasn’t reading and found that she was awake and looking at him. He reached over and took her hand and they stayed like this for a long time.