He looked just like his father, the way his straight dark brown hair hung over his hazel green eyes. He wore faded black and a blue denim jacket and green runners. She thought he resembled a drug dealer trying to look like an artist.
Cecilia asked, "May I pour you a glass of wine?”
“No thanks." He stared down at the gleaming hardwood floor that Dwight had refinished last weekend.
"How about cranberry juice and Perrier?"
“Okay.”
When she returned with his drink Sam looked at her and said, "You work at Willow House.”
“You remember me. Isn't it a small world.”
“Small world,” he echoed, forcing a brief courtesy of a smile.
“I'm not supposed to have alcohol".
“Oh."
"It’s the medication I'm on.”
“I understand. Are you still in Laurel House?"
"Thanks for putting me there. It saved my life.”
“I am glad we could help.”
She sat next to him on the couch and Sam visibly shrank from her. Instinctively Cecilia edged away till she was resting firmly on the other end of the sofa. Dwight observed them, bemused, from the armchair in the corner.
“How long have you lived there now?”
“Almost a year.”
“You like it?”
“It’s all I could ask for. My own apartment.”
“I’m glad we could help."
“I didn’t realize we live in the same neighbourhood.”
“It's not a well-kept secret, I'm afraid. How did you meet my husband?”
“We always say hi to each other. Then today in the park we started talking about this and that and he asked me over.” He added, as though in a confession, "I was sitting on the swing."
“Yes, I see.” She wanted to ask him what he and her husband had been talking about but held her breath.
“Do you want me to go?”
“No. Please stay. You are welcome here," she lied. Today was her day off. She did not want to be reminded of clients and their situations on her day off.
“I won’t stay long.”
“I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you.”
She broke a yawn with her clenched fist. Cecilia lived with her husband less than three blocks away from Laurel Manor. Always careful never to go walking in the neighbourhood Cecilia had never before run into any of her clients or patients. She wondered about lighting a fire in the fireplace then decided it was not quite cold enough even though it was already past Thanksgiving. She wondered why so many care facilities were named after trees. They had lived in their purchased townhouse for three years when the new housing facility for mental health sufferers was first proposed. For Cecilia, a psychiatric nurse for ten years, on her way to becoming a licensed social worker, there was no question. She had only recently become director of Willow House, a small and progressive psychiatric hospital. She had fought and resisted the NIMBY’s, the “Not In My Back Yards” who stridently rallied against this incursion upon their middle class sanctuary. Knowing it would be professional suicide to say what she really thought, Cecilia held her tongue at public forum meetings. Her husband had vocally endorsed the development and had spoken several times at the forum advocating for more and better housing for people with mental illness, appearing several times in the papers and on the news.
Dwight was a Vietnam War resister who had sought refuge in Canada. He had a heart bigger than the deep blue Pacific. He had never quite outgrown his hippie, activist, alternative lifestyle roots, and even now, with Sam, one of her clients, he still surprised Cecilia with unexpected and sometimes unwelcome household guests. Thank God he hardly ever did this now. He was fifty-eight, and had just taken early retirement. Cecilia was almost forty-five. By force of habit, or by force of their combined strong wills, they had managed to stay married to each other, their second for them both. There would never be children, though Dwight had a son who lived across the country in Halifax. Cecilia, following several trips to the abortion clinic, had her tubes tied before she was thirty.
Dwight prepared dinner: a chicken and vegetable stir-fry with couscous and salad. She covertly watched Sam, who ate slowly and delicately, with such impeccable good manners as she never would have expected but here again he was his father's son. But not his father for he seemed to breathe and inhabit, like many of the patients in her care, a finer and more rarified air than what was accorded to most dwellers upon the earth, an unbearable, frightening grace that made them unfit for ordinary life. He had several times attempted suicide, had wept and ranted about Jesus. He had seldom bathed; she remembered how bad he used to smell. They had done well with him.
“Sam, I understand you are working now,” she ventured.
“Yeah, I do stock at the new No Frills grocery store on Fourth, two days a week.”
“How do you like it?”
“It’s okay. A bit monotonous.”
“What would you like to do?”
“Be a minister.”
“A minister?”
“A pastor.”
“You go to church, then?”
“Yeah. I go with my Mom.”
“She must be very glad to have you there with her. Do you get along well, you and your Mom?”
“I think of her as my closest friend.”
“That must be very nice for both of you.”
“I think it is anyway. She doesn’t seem convinced. She wants me to be more independent, I guess, develop more friendships on my own.”
Cecilia almost asked him if he had any real friends. Then she thought of asking herself that question. She thought of her own mother, sequestered now in an extended care facility in Suburban Toronto following a series of crippling strokes and dementia, with only her unmarried brother for support and companionship. With a small gulp of wine she carefully rinsed the thought from her mind along with little bits of couscous from between her teeth.
For dessert they had white chocolate ice cream, which Dwight complained was indistinguishable from vanilla. She could remember Sam, a child of eight, eating ice cream, much as he did now. She took the spoon from her mouth and let it clang forcefully on the glass dish. “I’ll do the cleaning up,” she said. “Why don’t you guys watch TV?”
She scooped the leftover chicken stir-fry into a red plastic container. She picked out a limp sautéed green pepper, dangled it on her lips then slowly nibbled it. The couscous went into a blue container. She had bought them, the plastic containers, at the store where Sam was working. She saw him from behind and for a moment wondered if it was his father. The first time she had seen him he was eight years old, seated on his father’s livingroom rug, watching Saturday cartoons on the TV while eating ice cream. For five years she had been seeing Frank, who was generous, and had stuck faithfully to his promise of paying for her education. On weekends he had Sam, who otherwise lived with his mother. While the child sat in front of the TV they would go into the bedroom together, then come out after an hour, sometimes two hours. Besides the odd dinner, play, movie or concert that was all she had to do to earn her tuition. She had never once thought of the little boy.
Dwight tried to detain him by telling him about the history of the neighbourhood, which goes back over a hundred years. Sam seemed restless and distracted, as though thinking of his next dose of medication. Dwight's hair was quite grey now, as was his beard, which he had stubbornly maintained all through his teaching career in the local college, where for thirty years he had taught psychology. She thought of him as an aging Viking.
Dwight excused himself to read his e-mail, leaving Cecilia the unassisted task of seeing their guest to the door. She stared at Sam stupidly not knowing what to say while he put on his jacket. He was the same height and build as Frank, the same hazel green eyes. Not really athletic, but lithe, like a dancer or an expert fencer. His hair was a bit lighter, his nose less prominent, but there was no mistaking. Sam looked at her, a brief smile lighting his face. “You were wanting to know about my father," he said.
She didn’t answer. He breathed deeply, composing himself.
“He died, you know. Four years ago. Heart attack.”
“How old was he?”
“Fifty-five. Didn’t you know?”
“We lost contact when I graduated from college. Then I got married.”
“Were you and Dwight seeing each other then?”
“Dwight is my second husband.” She looked at him full of frustration, terror and tenderness. “Long story.”
“I know everything”, he said, staring at the floor. Then he looked at her directly. “You haven’t changed that much, you know. No one does, really.”
“I think you’re right.”
“Thank you for dinner. It was very nice. And thanks for letting me stay.”
“It was my pleasure, Sam." She felt sincere this time. "Good bye.” Dwight sat on the couch with his laptop, in front of a crackling fire he had just built. In the dining room she produced a bottle of French Chardonnay and two wine glasses. She had bought it last year for her husband’s birthday, but they’d gone out for dinner instead and she had forgotten to tell him about it. It wasn’t that expensive and it wasn’t really a favourite for either of them. As she searched for the corkscrew all kinds of words, sentences and half-formed phrases collided like sub-atomic particles inside her head. When had she ever succeeded in telling the truth? The simple and unadulterated truth without having to put her spin on it, without attempting to embroider it with her own cleverly wrought deceptions? On a shining silver tray she placed the opened bottle of wine and the two graceful glasses and carried them into the livingroom. The red wine that she poured into the two glasses shone like blood, rubies and garnets in the soft firelight. She sat just six inches from her husband aware of the oppressive force of the heat that proceeded from the pure white-hot flames that licked the wood into black and grey charcoal and ash. She felt the first tear stream down her cheek, then another, then another, and a strangled whimper escaped from Cecilia's throat as she collapsed in a convulsion of sobbing. Her husband set the laptop on the coffee table in front of him and gently stroked her lank auburn hair. He didn't ask and she already knew and felt assured that he wouldn't ask her any questions. The love Frank had carried with him into the crematorium was long ago released with his vapourized remains, a love, compromised by the money he paid her for her services lived now in the open air, known only to herself and his outlandishly beautiful, outlandishly wounded son; their love lived now in the world secretly breathed in by everything that lived and died, and had been released in love to return to the earth again. Her secret, their love, still lived unrevealed in every living thing, mountain, rock, river and ocean surrounding her and now she sobbed voicelessly next to her husband who cradled her now like a little girl woken from a nightmare. She let her head drop onto Dwight’s strong and loving shoulder and kept weeping. Not knowing what to say, or whether to say anything at all, Cecilia chose simply that this time she wasn’t going to tell any lies. She would say nothing this time. She chose to remain silent. The weeping subsided and Dwight continued to gently caress his wife’s hair, her back and her shoulders in front of the fire that grew stronger and hotter. Her heart felt like a small black stone swaddled in red velvet. She didn’t know how she would get to sleep tonight. She yawned and reached for her glass of wine.
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