I am well now. My speech still slurs a little, but only if I feel tired or self-conscious. Otherwise I can walk, talk, feed myself, dress myself, shower, go to the toilet unassisted, and do all the other things unaided that I used to take for granted. I can walk without getting tired. I still have a little trouble on the stairs but even this is beginning to mend. I could even go dancing if I had someone to take me. The ocean is calm today, like a sheet of molten platinum with a brilliant horizon line of light from the sun that has courteously broken through the cloud mantel. Even with this lovely view of the ocean and the snowy mountains of Washington State they are letting me have this place for a song. The apartment isn't the greatest. The walls are a slightly dingy coral pink colour, like a tacky Mexican resort, with the poster print of a cedar tree painting by that famous B.C. artist as the only wall adornment in the living room. There is another one in the bedroom, a tall gangly fir tree surrounded by turquoise and cobalt blue sky and bright white and yellow clouds dancing magically in the background. The coral pink wall and the malachite cedar and the magical blue sky go together well, I think. When I was a kid growing up our bathroom was painted the exact same shade of coral. I still love this colour.
I might have lost Sarah to government care had she still been a child. She found
us as she described to the courtroom lying on the floor, our limbs entangled, as though we had only just had violent sex, both of us covered in my husband's blood. There was a little bleeding from the gash in my skull, courtesy of the tire iron he ambushed me with. I was in the kitchen, chopping stewing meat for dinner. I must have moved away just in time because on the first blow he only grazed me. When I figured out what was happening I grabbed the butcher knife. Just as it went into his heart he hit me again and then I remembered nothing. I was still in the wheelchair during the final session in court. Sarah wheeled me out of the courtroom and we both tried to conceal our weeping from each other. I still need sedatives in order to sleep.
The air is warmer now that the sun is out. I am the only one walking along the cliff top. The wild broom and gorse are in bright yellow bloom and the ocean is gentle with slow lapping silver waves. The gorse and broom are very similar, with bright yellow pea shaped flowers that have hearts of bleeding crimson. The gorse, which I like slightly better, contains thorns. This is my second day here. Sarah will be here tonight, for the weekend, and then she returns to her university studies across the water. The cool wind undercuts the warmth and I suddenly miss my sweater which I left draped on a chair but it is too far to walk back for it. I never used to leave my clothes out like that, but I've become a bit lazy since my recovery. I rather enjoy leaving things out now. I haven't seen my daughter since Christmas. She says she misses the house but seems to understand that I had to sell it, that I can no longer live there. We haven't
discussed it. We have maintained, like a cobra sealed in an iron casket, a mutual silence about her father's death. She hugs me now. Before she hardly ever, simply accepting from me the occasional shy half-embrace and timid kiss on the forehead. Now, when she sees me, she runs and dives into my arms and smothers her face in me, as though to find refuge from the outer harm that threatens. I will never be able to console her for the loss of her father. I know that she misses him and that she loved him, even when she sided with me against him and against his beatings. One day I will have to tell her this. Maybe tonight after dinner. Or tomorrow morning at breakfast. Odd how these family confessions always seem best reserved for mealtimes. Seagulls wheel in the sky above me like white and grey portents and there are crows everywhere. The crashing surf below seems to sound a warning with each kelp infested wave. The clouds have lifted from the mountains across the water and now they gleam blue and white, dwarfed by distance in a foreign land.
A young man in black shorts and T-shirt jogs past me and, thinking that he could be Bob, I nearly smile back at him. This has happened a few times as though he has sprung back to life and now wants to taunt me. I still don't know why seeing my dead husband's doppelgangers makes me want to smile. But I do.
This cafe is large and airy with big windows and a wide bright open space. Today it is surprisingly busy, since today for most people is a workday. I must be the only person here who is older than forty, and the only one sitting alone without a laptop computer. There are even two couples sharing tables each focussed on his or her laptop. They likely haven't spoken in hours. Perhaps had Bob and I had this technology he never would have hit me. He would still be alive. We would still be married, sort of, sharing the same house and the same daughter, perhaps even sleeping together from time to time. Bed death happened early in our marriage, not long after the first time he hit me. He soon moved into the guest room, not wanting to sleep beside damaged goods. This happened soon after Sarah was born. The staff here seem nice. The young lady behind the counter smiled and asked how my morning is going. She reminds me of Sarah, but today, every young woman I see reminds me of my daughter.
I still refuse to talk to journalists. They already know what they need to. Sarah might want to come here with me tomorrow. She works in a cafe on campus. I'm sure she's doing well. My daughter is very good with people. She still looks like a young female incarnation of her father. She doesn't know how she frightens me sometimes.
I can't return to work, not with my husband's blood so famously staining my hands. I have already accepted that I will never again work as a psychiatric nurse, nor in any capacity as a health care professional. I am here for one month. No one seems to recognize or remember me from TV or the newspapers. In my own city, I couldn't go anywhere without feeling noticed, or observed. Often some stranger would stop me, ask questions, assure me of their full support, ask about Sarah. Last year I moved, and now here in this city, maybe one person, a hotel guest in the lobby, looked at me for just a little bit longer than what felt comfortable. It was a woman near my age, waiting for her husband. I returned her discreet gaze, and stared hard at her. She looked away. I asked if she thought it might rain. She shuffled with a newspaper, but didn't look up, pretending, quite badly, that she didn't hear or see me. She had a gentle soft face, just succumbing to the gravity of the years, and hard metallic little eyes that never missed anything. I wanted to slap her.
This city isn't new, or strange to me. It is postcard lovely with a nasty underseam of sleaze. Stepping over homeless beggars sleeping on pavement and dodging drug peddlers while on one's way to enjoy high tea in a fancy hotel has become the stuff of cocktail chatter. The buildings are all old and lovely and exquisitely crafted and sculpted, bravely propped up like aging starlets showing off their most recent cosmetic surgery. For now I am a tourist. A month by the beautiful sea. A month of sightseeing and enjoying long and healthful walks among the famous oak groves in the park by the beautiful sea. A month of reading magazines and cheap paperback novels, on nice days seated on green wooden benches by the beautful sea.
A deal is being negotiated to help me resettle, to re-establish my life, to start over. I could stay here in this country under a new name and my face made unrecognizable by plastic surgery. They could make me look fifteen years younger and then I could hook me a fancy man to take me out dancing. Or I could settle in a Latin American country where I could live off the generous proceeds of the settlement while dodging sleek and oily gigolos. I will never work again as a nurse, nor in any position in the health care system, not with my notoriety, with the entire country knowing what I look like, not with Bob Galloway's red streaming blood dripping warm from my fingers. I still wear his wedding band, and the diamond engagemeent ring rides just above it like a hula-hoop being flaunted by a shameless mistress.
He didn't really formally propose to me thirty years ago. Following our second night together, we'd gone out for brunch and while we were on our way back to his little apartment for an afternoon of lovemaking, he stopped in a jewelry store. I shyly followed him in. Which one do you like, he asked me, as we stared at the silken pallet of sparkling diamonds. I pointed to one on the left, one finely cut large stone, radiant with the colours of the day. Try it on, he told me. I asked him why. We are getting married, he replied, and I, still delirious from the cocktail of happy hormones he had unleashed in my bloodstream, and drowsy and sluggish from the eggs benedict and toast, replied, sure, why not.
He worked for the government, fundraising for a political party whose policies I still hate, whom I blame for our current epidemic of homelessness and high housing costs. I was burnt-out from politics when we met. He was sexy and attentive and rather nice in bed. Following the honeymoon, the reality of his rancid morning breath and chronic snoring helped reawaken me politically and we soon became silent enemies, long before he began sneaking in and out of the beds of other women. Because of his high position the media couldn't shut up about the knife I had plunged inside him. Quite simply, I was the wicked black widow who had brazenly slaughtered her doting husband who had done so much for big business and the creation of underpaying jobs in this province, that I had cruelly deprived the neo-liberal right of one of their most glowing fiscal puppet-masters.
Every day I will have to work at keeping myself entertained here, distracted and engaged with the faux-English quaintess of this tawdry provincial capital. Better that he'd succeeded in killing me, better that I'd been rendered a vegetable quadriplegic incapable of speech, thought or feeding myself. But I suppose that my life,
in some form, has to continue, and I find the idea of suicide both repugnant and terrifying. Perhaps because I'm a coward. Or maybe because I always want to know what is going to happen next. I don`t want to miss anything. I was like that even as a little girl, when I would crouch on the stairs long after I'd been put to bed to catch a glimpse of whatever Mom and Dad were watching on TV. One night I saw them kissing, another time they were wrapped in each other's arms and legs and moving like two rhythmic entwined serpents. I knew not to keep looking and quietly fled back to the protective chaste darkness of my little bedroom. Now they are both dead.
The tea here is perfect, if a little stong and the scone drips fresh strawberry jam and clotted cream streaming over my fingers in hues of blood and milk to the strains of Mozart, Vivaldi, and Chopin. On my left, ensconced in the same high-backed upholstered chairs sit an old couple, perhaps eighty or so, and behind them, a young couple no older than thirty, likely honey-mooners. Across the way from me a large Asian family, probably Chinese, gorge on cucumber sandwiches. The high tea is expensive, but worth every dime for the pleasure of sitting like a grand faux-bourgeois. Bourgeois is a word I haven't thought of using in many years, not since my brief foray into student activism, while rallying with the crowds of trade-unionists, church groups and students, when we tried to bring this government down, here in this same city noted for its musty charm, on the expansive lawn of the legislative building less than half a kilometre away from here. Bob and I had been married less than a year and he was wroth with humiliation over my activism. This was after all a government that he supported and endorsed and that employed him and generously paid our mortgage. It wasn't long after, when over an argument that began over the correct way to hang a roll of toilet paper, that he hit me for the first time. Not hard. It was rather a light tap on the cheek. He was saving the worst for later.
A final swallow of tea washes down the chocolate ganache that cloys on my tongue. The only patron seated alone here I am the first to get up and leave. The street is filled with tourists. The beautiful provincial legislature sprawls like a pampered courtesan over the expansive lawn. The rambling brownstone is covered with green domes and cupolas that gleam in the sun like the multitudinous breasts of a fertility goddess. I am suddenly hungry again and resist an urge for ice cream. I am moving in a large circle that is taking me back to the park, to the sea bluffs, and to the apartment. Here is the house of the famous artist where she lived with her animals and boarders. I mentioned that my leased apartment is adorned with two poster prints of her paintings of evergreen trees. The house wears Victorian propriety like a slightly loosened whalebone corset. I have never worn one of those things, and the thought of my congenital chunkiness morphing into a top-heavy hourglass makes me break into a schoolgirl giggle. The young man passing me smiles back at me and I recognize the clear blue eyes of the jogger in black, the blue eyes of my dead husband. And now I remember the dream. I have had it many times, since my stay in the hospital. For some reason I have kept forgetting it. Why now do I remember it? Bob and I hovering over our blood drenched bodies and I watch and listen while Sarah is shrieking in horror, a horrendous sobbing breaking out of her wide open mouth. And there is Bob reaching towards her, then reaching towards me, his blue eyes widening in horror as he is sucked, swallowed and subsumed into the unseen. I also know that before I can tell it to Sarah I will have forgotten this dream though I will never forget my husband's look of absolute terror.
In the corner store that opens the ground floor of an old wooden building I am lured by a small bag of cashews. Their rich sweetness almost melts in my mouth and I slowly chew one nut at a time, protectively coddling it on my gratified tongue like a sacred morsel of holy bread. The sun is out and the sky is blue and the radiant colours of the day that surround me hurt my eyes. I step back into the park and the protective shade of the malachite forest and a raven begins to croak.
When Sarah my daughter, my only child comes I shall invite her here, down by the beautiful sea. We will walk through the famous grove of gnarled and twisted garry-oak trees, then through the field of tall grass, radiant yellow buttercups and shining purple camas lilies. Together we will take the long wooden staircase down to the
smooth rocks below where we shall sit and look in shallow little pools for greenish turquoise sea anemones. We will watch for whales. They are sometimes seen here. Black and white and splendid like giant savage porpoises swimming and diving and dancing in the platinum water, killing and eating fish and young seals and any small creature
that gets in their way. She will mention Bob her father, Bob my husband, Bob the man I murdered whose red blood stains now the satin these rings once sat in and now flows into this tidal pool in a torrent gush where it will stain the water red and poison the ocean. I will offer Sarah the rings and if she will not have them I will throw them into the deepest part of the water. I have forgotten the dream. Perhaps I should carry with me a pen and notebook, because one day I will remember again the dream and then I can write it down to tell her.
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