Alligator - Lisa Moore [107]
Funerals, said Madeleine. Nobody brings a date to a funeral. The men come out in droves.
The emergency ward is good, Isobel said.
Funerals, Madeleine insisted. Her mouth was full of lettuce. She put the hamburger down.
What is so bloody hard about medium-rare, can you tell me?
The production has shut down, the production assistant says. The director will be waked at Caul’s Funeral Home and in lieu of flowers people are asked to send donations to Médicins Sans Frontières.
Madeleine had said, Look, I’m dying. She was waving her fork, making a point about the burger. The point was if she was dying, really dying, couldn’t the universe conspire to give her a proper hamburger. She had given up meat and now she was treating herself and look what they had served her.
She was dying and she said Isobel was free to bring a date to the funeral. She waved the waitress down and explained again about how, exactly, she wanted her burger. When it came back it was burnt.
Isobel wanted to tell her about the fire because Madeleine would deal with it. Isobel knew she couldn’t trust herself. Something was wrong with her. She was in the grip of a powerful man at a bad time in her life. She was being crushed. She would shut her eyes and grip the fork and knife and say arson. She would say about his hand on her throat, how tight, she would say about all her belongings going up in smoke. How off-kilter and afraid she had become. She would say about the pills she’d been taking.
I have to tell you something, Isobel had said.
I don’t have long, Madeleine said.
FRANK
IT HAD RAINED for most of December, icy rain and the afternoons were dark but there hadn’t been any snow. The rain lashed against the houses and the sidewalks were slippery and sometimes it turned to sleet. Frank had been cutting business cards at the photocopy shop for most of the afternoon and it was almost closing time. Lana had finished the floors. She turned off the buzzing lights and her yellow rubber gloves looked luminous in the gloom.
She stood for a moment leaning against the doorway, holding the mop handle with both hands and resting her chin on the tip.
He could smell the ammonia floor cleaner. It was a smell that reminded him of his mother. He could see his mother in a short-sleeved shirt, her elbows eczema-crackled.
Ammonia reminded him of cancer, the eradicating, indifferent swath it had cut in his life, and the July evening when he was five and Mrs. Hallett brought him back home, after his mother’s double mastectomy.
Your mother is getting out of the hospital, Frank, she’d said. And he was afraid to trust it.
Mrs. Hallett had taken him to Middle Cove Beach for caplin when he was five. He and Kevin scrabbling over the rocks, picking up the wiggling fish with their bare hands. Someone had a flashlight trained on the curling waves and he saw the caplin twisting on the breaking surf like a silver scarf. Mrs. Hallett had got down on one knee and had taken hold of his elbows and said that his mother would be home when they got back to town. She was bringing him directly to his mother’s apartment. You can show her all your fish, she’d said.
Afterwards, he’d stood on the sidewalk on Water Street and a window opened on the third floor and there was his mother in her flannel nightdress, elbows on the sill, leaning out, waiting for him. He’d opened the Dominion bag for her to look, caplin glinting under the street light.
There was a funny phone call, Lana said. Water was still gurgling through the pipes somewhere on the fifth floor. But the building was empty. Why, when you turn off the lights in an old building like this, does everything alter? He could hear the wind outside. Everything was about his mother tonight; it had something to do with the weather. The giant cola-tinted window of the photocopy shop overlooked the harbour. It was covered in beads of rain. She was so proud when