A Strange Kind of Comfort Read online

  Anton lives in the farmhouse in the yard, the one where Jack and his sisters grew up. After Allison was born and Sarah and Jack had outgrown the house trailer, Anna, her mother-in-law, talked about retiring, moving to a house in town so Jack and Sarah could have the farmhouse. But Anton wouldn’t hear of it. With the soil and the sun flowing through his veins, they all knew Anton would never leave the farm. So Jack and Sarah built a new home next to the trailer. It was handy, having Anna in the same yard to help out with the girls when Sarah was needed to run a combine or pick up seed in the spring, but she wishes they’d all stood up to Anton and insisted that he and Anna move to a place with a smaller yard and garden for Anna to look after.

  When Anna died suddenly of a heart attack, life, as they knew it, folded in on itself. Eventually they got used to living without her, but it was hardest for Anton; she’d stood beside him for nearly fifty years. It was the farm — the grinding familiarity and routine of the seasons — and his three granddaughters that finally gave him his peace. He still helps Jack with the field work, harrowing or cutting hay, simple chores that take him twice as long to complete as it would take Jack. Jack often says he catches him dozing in the tractor or finds the swather idling in the hayfield while Anton wanders along the edge of the field, filling his cap with saskatoons.

  Allison’s van is parked by the house; she called Sarah earlier to ask for a favour. “Do you want to come to the house for a cup of coffee and see Connor?” Sarah asks Anton as she climbs back into the truck.

  He smiles, a gap-toothed grin. He adores his great-grandson and clings to a slim hope that Connor will take over the Bilyk land some day. It doesn’t occur to him one of the girls might want to farm, although that’s unlikely. Anton is bound to an old country tradition, believing land should pass from the heart of a man to the hands of a son. Although he tried not to show it, Anton couldn’t hide his disappointment when Toni was born. They named her Antonia, to try to make it up to him, but he got the same pained look he’d had after Anna died when Jack told him they wouldn’t have another. He loved each of the girls, bouncing them on his knee when they were babies, crooning a Ukrainian song about flying birds as they followed his dancing fingers with their bright little eyes. But they weren’t the boy he’d hoped at least one of them would be.

  * * *

  Sarah comes into the kitchen and Connor, wearing his Superman cape, bounds across the room and leaps into her arms.

  “Hey, how’s my little superhero?” she says, kissing the top of his head.

  “Mommy said I sleep over!”

  Allison waddles around the corner with a sheepish look on her face. “That’s my favour. Is that okay, Mom? He’s just about bouncing off the walls. I don’t have the energy for him in this heat.”

  Allison is seven months pregnant, carrying her baby straight out in front of her the way Sarah carried each of her girls. She looks like Jack, with the same acorn-coloured hair and tall, slim build, although her face and fingers are puffy from the heat.

  “Sure you can stay with us, sweetie,” Sarah says. “You can help Baba water her flowerpots after we have supper, okay?”

  “Thanks, Mom. I am just so tired chasing after him all day. How am I going to do this when I have another one? I’ll never get through it.”

  “Oh, yes, you will. You’ll survive it. All mothers do. It’s not easy, especially when all that’s keeping you going is a couple hours’ sleep and a strong pot of coffee.”

  “Survive what?” Jack asks, appearing at the back door with his grimy ball cap in his hand.

  “Motherhood,” she says as Jack leans down for a hug and Connor launches himself into his embrace.

  “Gido! Come! See my tractor!” Connor says before rushing back to the living room, where he is using his toy tractor to cultivate the carpet.

  “I guess you and Mom are keeping Connor for me tonight.”

  “Big date?”

  “Gido! I is waiting!” Connor calls from the living room.

  “I wish. No, Jason’s on call this week but maybe he’ll take me to the Tempo tonight and spring for an ice cream cone.”

  “Me having ice cream, too!” Connor pokes his head around the doorway.

  Allison sinks into one of the kitchen chairs, picks up a grocery-store flyer from the table, and fans herself. “I swear, how did he hear that? I bet if I told him we were going home and he had to put that tractor away, he’d be deaf as a stump.”

  Jack goes to the living room to help Connor set up lengths of white plastic fence and place the cows and pigs in their pens, while Sarah tells Allison about her visit to Sunny Haven.

  “I took Connor to see Grandpa last week,” Allison says. “As usual, he didn’t have a clue who I was. In fact, he was a little hostile toward Connor. He was looking at those photos in Grandpa’s room, pointing and naming all of us, and Grandpa got upset with him. He said Connor shouldn’t touch the pictures, that he was breaking his things.”

  “He was agitated today, too. Going on about some poor dead person. I didn’t know what he was talking about but I think he meant old George across the hall.”

  “Has anyone moved in to that room yet?”

  The back door slams. Maeve, home from her summer job in the city for a week of holidays, has just picked Toni up from work. The girls are four years apart and couldn’t be more different. Toni is a dreamer, creative and eloquent, while Maeve sees the world in concrete terms. Toni wants to be a writer while Maeve is working on her MBA.

  “Does it have to be so bloody hot?” Toni says, plunking into the chair nearest the fan. She gathers her black curls, holding them up with one hand away from her slender neck, and leans into the fan’s weak breeze. Maeve has the fair skin and strawberry-blond hair of the Coyles, her face flushed and her hair sprung into tight curls.

  “Aunty have ice cream?” Connor asks, coming into the kitchen hauling Toni’s beloved old bear, Boo, by one arm.

  “Hey, little man,” Maeve says, scooping him up for a kiss. “Ice cream sounds wonderful.”

  Anton, leaning on his cane, limps into the kitchen and lowers himself into the nearest chair.

  “It’s too hot for June. What’s the temperature anyway?”

  Toni pulls her iPhone out of her jeans pocket. “Thirty-one.”

  “No, the real temperature. Sarah, check the thermometer,” Anton says, waving to the window.

  “Eighty-eight,” she says automatically. She’s been converting the temperature from Celsius to Fahrenheit for him for over thirty years.

  “How can you know how hot it is outside by looking at that?” Anton says, pointing at Toni’s phone with his chin.

  “It’s an app, Gido. You can check your phone for any place you want. Just click on it and it’ll tell you what the weather’s like there.”

  “App, shmapp. Phones are for talking, and only when there’s something important to tell somebody. Years back, we had only one phone, hanging on the wall, not something so small, like a deck of cards, you can put in your pocket,” Anton says, flapping one hand at Toni. “And party lines, six of us sharing. And a good thing, too. That party line saved the farm that time there was that big fire.”

  “Gido, you need a cellphone,” Toni says, egging him on. “That way Dad can keep track of you, know where you are and what you’re doing.”

  “Phhht. He knows what I’m doing. What I tell him I’m doing before I leave in the morning with the tractor, that’s what,” he says.

  After Sarah pours the coffee, Allison gives Connor a peanut butter cookie and a glass of milk and settles him on Anton’s lap. “You never finished telling me about your visit with Grandpa, Mom.”

  “Poor Grandpa,” Sarah says, sitting down with a cup of coffee. “Sometimes I wonder why I even bother to visit. He doesn’t even know I’m there.”

  “Sure he does,” Allison replies. “He may not know who you are, but, at some level, he must remember you, your voice, the way you speak to him. He seems to relax when you’re there and h
e calms right down.”

  “Poor old Joe. It was hard when Anna died, but at least she went to bed that last night with everything good as ever up here,” Anton says, tapping his head with one finger. “She had the potatoes peeled, ready in the pot to cook the next morning for the peroheh. That’s how I want to go. Quick, like that. With my workboots on.”

  “It seems unfair, really,” Toni says, reaching for a cookie. “Grandpa’s so spry, built for speed, like he used to say, motoring around the care home like he’s thirty years old. And then there are the others, strapped in their wheelchairs, like Mrs. Atchison, who can’t say a word, yet you know she’s still in there, those green eyes twinkling, wanting to ask how we’re doing like she used to when you bumped into her in the post office.”

  “I think it’s better to be like Grandpa, actually,” Maeve says, wiping a drip of milk off Connor’s chin with her thumb. “Sure, it’s terrible, him not knowing who any of us are anymore, but at least he’s forgotten what happened to Uncle Pat and he doesn’t remember that his wife ran off and left all of you.”

  The kitchen goes silent except for the gurgle of the coffee pot. Even though Patrick died when Sarah was a child, the girls have grown up knowing him in the same way they know their grandmother, Anna, and Sarah’s own baba. She has kept their memories alive for the girls, showing them pictures and sharing stories about them. But they all know they are never to speak about Sarah’s mother, although Anton once told Sarah she looked like her, with the same black curls. It might have been the way she flinched, or the dark look that surely passed over her face, but he never mentioned her to Sarah again.

  “So you were about to tell me about Grandpa’s new neighbour,” Allison says in an attempt to change the sombre mood. “Anyone we know?”

  Sarah hesitates, her heart suddenly pounding. She is reminded of the promise she made to Jack long ago, the agreement they have to keep the hurtful truth of the past buried where it belongs. She’s protected him for so long but how can she be expected to continue now that Caroline is moving in across the hall from her father?

  They’re all looking at her, wide-eyed, waiting for her answer, when Connor tips over his cup, splashing milk all over the table. Anton shouts, “Holy geez!” and Toni jumps up, cupping her hands to catch the spill before it drips over the edge. Sarah hurries to the sink for the dishcloth and breathes a sigh of relief. In the ensuing chaos, Allison’s question is forgotten.

  CAROLINE

  Caroline is reminded of the Tupper twins, girls she once knew from school, as she watches two of the smallest girls in the choir’s front row cover their mouths with their hands and whisper. Twins, possibly, but surely sisters; they have identical turned-up noses, pointed chins, and straight black hair with bangs that need trimming. They’re wearing the same navy trousers, blue T-shirts, and sashes as the rest of the girls but the uniforms of this pair look as though they’ve been dug out of a heap of dirty laundry at the foot of a bed. One of them points at the row of wheelchairs and they giggle behind their hands. Caroline is tempted to wag her finger at them. “Born in a barn,” her mother used to say whenever Caroline was rude or forgot her manners.

  While Cara, the young aide, dressed her this morning, Caroline argued that she should be allowed to stay in her room. Why did she have to take part in these pointless social events, wheeled out into the common room and set out on display for everyone to gawk at like a heifer in an auction ring? Cara told her it would do her good; taking part in group activities stimulated Caroline’s brain. There’s nothing wrong with my brain, Caroline shot back. It was her broken-beyond-repair hip that had sentenced her to spend the rest of her days in this dreaded wheelchair.

  A middle-aged woman, wearing the same royal-blue sash as the girls, taps two sticks together and the group starts to sing, slightly off-key, although one of the older girls in the back row has a lovely voice and is carrying the melody almost single-handedly. It’s a song Caroline remembers playing on the radio when she was a girl and, after a few bars, she feels her shoulders relax from where they’ve been hunched up under her ears. She’s thinking about a rainbow stretched across a bright blue sky when there’s a commotion near the kitchen. The man who lives in the room across the hall is paddling his hands at loose air while Scott, the orderly (although Caroline’s been told they don’t call male attendants that anymore), has his arms wrapped around him from behind, holding him an inch or two off the floor. The old man kicks out with one foot and knocks over a small table holding a pitcher of pink juice and it crashes to the floor. The sisters quit singing and stare and, one by one, the voices of the little choir trickle out as a woman hurries across the room and takes the old man by the hand. He shakes his head the way a defiant two-year-old might and, between Scott and the woman, is led away.

  After what seems like an hour, the choir resumes its song and Caroline sighs. This is what her life has come to; nothing but all this endless waiting. She is wheeled out to wait for breakfast and lunch and supper. Wheeled out to wait for everyone to be assembled and settled before any activity begins. She’s been here a week and doesn’t know if she can survive the tedium of this place.

  After her fall down the basement stairs, she’d spent eight weeks in the hospital, a horrid place, the food tasteless and her room so close to the nurses’ desk it was never quiet or dark enough to get a proper sleep without one of those small orange pills. She thought she would eventually return to her own house with the help of home care once her hip was healed (not that she wanted strangers popping in and out at all times of day) but she was told she would have to be panelled. Panelled? She was thinking of the wood-looking sheets Eldon had once nailed up on the porch walls when Dr. Boutreau told her she couldn’t go home. Her injury was too severe; she would never walk again.

  The woman is back, speaking to a nurse by the overturned table while the janitor mops up the juice. “May I go back to my room?” Caroline asks Cara.

  “You’re not enjoying the sing-song?”

  “Oh, yes. The girls are very good, it’s just that I’m feeling unwell.”

  Cara sighs. “You win.” She tosses the towel she’s holding onto a chair and takes Caroline back to her room, settling her into bed and handing her the remote control.

  “Is there anything else you need right now?” Cara asks as she tucks an afghan over Caroline’s feet.

  “Just some peace and quiet, and would you please close my door?”

  When Cara is gone, Caroline switches on the television. There is never anything to watch during the day; talk shows with silly celebrities, or afternoon doctors discussing bowel issues or personal family matters that should be kept within the walls of one’s own home. Why would anyone willingly air such private details and bring such disgrace to their families? She turns off the television and leans back on her pillow, closing her eyes.

  Life has changed so much since she was a girl. Young people marrying after the birth of their children or living together without walking down the aisle at all, for instance. No one bats an eye these days when a single girl gets herself in trouble. Adultery and divorce are so commonplace no one thinks anything of it. How different things were back then. Family secrets were kept in the shadows, elaborate stories woven to cover or protect the shame.

  Don’t think. Don’t think. ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both …’ She begins the Robert Frost poem in her mind.

  Long ago, she learned she could replace her troubled thoughts by mentally reciting poetry, a trick she used most often on nights when Eldon still came to her bed, his presence there weighing on her conscience. But after Eldon died, her secret finally lay dormant. Without him around to remind her daily of her transgression, she was rarely disturbed by it. It was this upheaval, the move to this horrendous place with the clatter of trays in the dining room and the constant stream of people milling around that had brought everything spewing back to mind. Never a moment’s peace. A tear springs to her eye. Don’t think. Don�
�t agonize over such things. ‘And be one traveller, long I stood.’ I can’t bear it. Haven’t I suffered enough?

  Her thoughts are a jumble as she tries to relive the summer day Becca went away. If she could just get it clear in her mind. It’s so long ago; she can scarcely remember. Was it Jack or Eldon or both, facing her down with such bitter hatred in their eyes? Bilyk or Webb? Who blamed her more?

  Outside of her room, she hears wheelchairs rolling down the hall as Cara and the other aides return her new neighbours to their rooms. All of them, like me, without much use left for this world, she thinks. Sunny Haven: the last home for all of us as we wait to die. She closes her eyes. She must find her peace soon before it’s her time, but how will she do it?

  Perhaps if she goes back to the beginning and comes out at the end of that fateful day she might uncover some clue she has missed. If she replays each detail of those long-ago years in her mind, she might remember. She must bring them all back, starting with her parents; her mother, who she loved beyond measure, and her demanding father, to whom she was bound. And Eldon Webb, who she met on a blustery spring day.

  She should have been studying for a history exam but she was sitting at the kitchen table, lingering over a page in the Eaton’s catalogue, admiring smart and stylish spring coats — a red, double-breasted one with silver buttons in particular — when her mother turned down the radio and peered out the window into the swirling snow. “Henry,” she said to Caroline’s father. “Someone’s coming down the lane. Who would venture out on a day like this?”

  Caroline joined her mother at the window. A man wearing a long, tan-coloured coat with the collar pulled up over his ears leaned into the wind as he ploughed his way toward the house through snow halfway to his knees. The wind had picked up considerably in the last hour — the snow drifted and swirled — and Caroline could just make out the dark shape of the truck he’d driven off the lane by the mailbox next to the road.