On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light Read online

  “There’s no law saying she has to.”

  “No, but folks do. They take a good long look at death, get real personal with it then decide they’ve had enough. It wears you out.”

  “A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop alop bam boom,” the parrot shrieks.

  After Gran’s gone to bed, Harriet lies stiffly on the IKEA sofa, imagining what’s happening to Irwin. He’ll be hooked up to an IV. They’ll have put electrodes on his head to monitor his convulsions and tubes up his nose and penis. They’ll monitor his breathing and put a clip on his finger to check his blood pressure. His eyeballs will roll around under his lids, and he’ll chew even though he isn’t eating. Sometimes he’ll become rigid, other times he’ll have tremors or twitching.

  It would be so great if he died.

  Harriet’s heart seems to be beating higher than normal, as though it’s trying to force its way up her throat and out her mouth. Ever since Gran’s bypass operation, Harriet’s had heart trouble, particularly when she’s trying to sleep. She has to calm her heart, talk to it like one of the seniors, or it will leap out of her. Sometimes she feels it stop and has to jump around to get it moving again. She doesn’t trust her heart.

  She must make sure Gran takes her pills. She’ll sneak them into food like they do with Irwin, or Mrs. Schidt’s dog. Mrs. Schidt stuffs Coco’s antidepressants into cheese and he gobbles them up. Who’s going to walk Coco while Harriet’s at Gran’s? Darcy saw an ad for dog walking, $16 per hour for a group walk, $22 for a private walk. Darcy says Harriet is being hosed by Mrs. Schidt and should demand a raise. Maybe if Mrs. Schidt is forced to hire an expensive dog walker, Harriet will be in a good negotiating position when she gets back.

  Her heart stops again and she hops around, worried she is being punished for wanting her brother dead.

  “A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down the pants,” the parrot shrieks.

  Four

  In the morning the parrot is gone and Harriet no longer feels constricted by a pressure stocking, but that she is loosening in all directions. Her hands flop on her wrists and her feet dangle from her ankles. She spills milk and drops the Cap’n Crunch. Not only has the parrot fled, but Lynne hasn’t called. Her mother has forgotten about her again.

  Gran, in her turquoise sequinned peaked cap, announces that Jedi is driving them to the Scarborough Town Centre. “He’s going to treat us to lunch in that nice food court. You can get anything you want there—Chinese, pizza, burgers, you name it.”

  Jed drives in both lanes at the same time. Drivers honk but he doesn’t seem to notice. He’s more concerned about whether or not he has the necessary documents to get his passport renewed. His daughter, in Boston, has been trying to get him to visit for two years. Harriet stares at the strands of white hair stretched across his pate, trying to figure out why his daughter wants him to visit. In Harriet’s experience most family members don’t like each other, although they pretend they do. The only family members she’s met who truly like each other are Filipino and always cramming into Mr. Rivera’s in 313. Even after Mrs. Rivera died, the Riveras’ children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews continued to crowd around the karaoke machine singing golden oldies. Mr. Rivera invites Harriet to sing with them when she buys him bananas from Mr. Hung’s, but she’s too shy, despite the Riveras’ encouragement. Mr. Rivera says one day Harriet will sing “My Way” with him.

  The light turns green, but Jed doesn’t notice. “My daughter’s lonely south of the border. Too many Yanks.” The car behind them honks.

  Gran pulls the visor down to check her lipstick in the mirror. “Why’d she move there then?”

  “Opportunity.”

  “What’s she do?” Harriet asks.

  “She’s a doctor.”

  Gran flips the visor back up. “What’s stopping her being a doctor here?”

  “She makes more money in the U.S.”

  “Money isn’t everything,” Gran says. This is a lie, considering Mads’ hunt for a widower with money in the bank.

  “Why doesn’t your daughter visit you here?” Harriet asks.

  “Says she’s too busy.”

  Harriet’s father said he was too busy to take her to the Abstract Impressionist show at the AGO. Harriet figured out this was another adult lie. She suspects the doctor isn’t too busy either; she just doesn’t want to see her father. That Jedi can’t figure this out makes Harriet envy him.

  He drops them at the entrance to Sears before heading for the passport office. When Harriet pleads with the two of them to arrange a meeting time and place, Gran says, “Pish posh, don’t be such a ninny. Jedi’ll find us. Let’s have some fun.” Harriet never has fun in the Scarborough Town Centre. She constantly gets lost and has to retrace her steps to find her bearings. Mads is no help because she wanders wherever she pleases, heedless of who is tagging along behind her. Harriet must keep a constant eye on her, a challenging task because Gran has shrunk due to osteoporosis and easily disappears behind displays.

  “Let’s get us some perfume samples,” Mads says, charging into Cosmetics.

  The smell of cologne gives Harriet a headache but she enjoys looking at the bottles and the light shining through their exotic contents. While Gran spritzes perfume behind her ears and on her wrists, Harriet fondles the bottles, soothed by their smooth, rounded surfaces in hues of gold, yellow, bronze and apricot. Her favourite is a combination of smooth and textured glass, draping from a cylindrical cap like a lady’s evening gown. “Isn’t this beautiful?” she asks before turning to where her grandmother was seconds ago. “Gran?” Mads is nowhere in sight and Harriet feels herself coming undone again. “Gran!” she calls, causing the heavily made-up women behind the cosmetic counters to stare at her.

  “Have you seen an old lady in a turquoise hat?” Harriet asks.

  The heavily made-up women shake their heads. “Try paging her from Customer Service,” one of them says. “It’s on the third floor.”

  Leaving the first floor would mean losing any chance of finding Gran. Harriet scours the main floor behind stacks of shoes, shelves of handbags, scarves and hats. Her heart pushes at her throat, and she keeps swallowing to force it back down. Periodically she thumps her collarbone to restart it. She pauses in Jewellery because she can see above the display cases. A saleswoman with an angular haircut watches her. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m just waiting for someone.”

  “Don’t lean on the display cases.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Are you lost?”

  “No.”

  “If you’re lost, you should go to Customer Service on the third floor.”

  Harriet checks her watch every few minutes to make it appear as though she is waiting for someone. If Gran’s gone to Dollarama to buy lilac-scented soap, Harriet will never catch up with her. Dollarama is on another tentacle, near the Walmart. Maybe Gran’s gone into the Walmart to look for shoes.

  After fifteen minutes in Jewellery, Harriet takes the escalator to Customer Service where she waits at the counter until an ample woman, wearing clothes that look too small for her, asks if she can help her.

  “I’ve lost my grandmother. Can you page her, please?”

  “Name?”

  “Madeleine Stott.”

  “Your name?”

  “Harriet Baggs.”

  “Relation?”

  “She’s my grandmother.” Harriet said this already. “Please tell Madeline Stott that her granddaughter is waiting for her at Customer Service on the third floor.”

  The woman picks up the phone and says, “Madeline Stott, please go to Customer Service. Your granddaughter’s looking for you.”

  “Please tell her it’s on the third floor.”

  “On the third floor.”

  “Can you say the whole thing again a little louder? She doesn’t hear very well.”
/>   The buttons on the woman’s too-small blouse strain as she sighs and says, louder, “Madeline Stott, please go to Customer Service on the third floor.”

  “Your granddaughter, Harriet, is looking for you,” Harriet prompts.

  “Your granddaughter, Harriet, is looking for you.” She slams the receiver down. “Okay, you can sit over there while you wait.” She points to a row of metal chairs.

  “Thank you.” Harriet takes a seat beside a mother and child. The mother chews her chipped nail polish, reading the same issue of People that Harriet cut up for Lynne. Dressed in pink, the little girl repeatedly pushes a picture book at her mother and asks her to read it. The mother, without putting down the magazine, says, “You can’t just read about fairies and princesses all the time, Jessica,” then takes a call on her cell.

  The little girl in pink gnaws a corner of her book about fairies and princesses while staring at Harriet. Every second that Harriet waits, she feels Gran orbiting farther away from her.

  The little girl steps cautiously nearer. “Do you have a glass eye?”

  “No.”

  “My brother has a glass eye and my mom has to put moisture in it at night so it doesn’t dry up. When he blinks it’s like a windshield wiper.”

  The mother grabs the girl’s arm and yanks her back to her seat while yelling into her cell. “What did I just say? Use the fucking gift certificate and forget the coupon.”

  Harriet takes the escalator to the main floor, exits the Sears and looks for arrows pointing to Walmart. Shoppers bump her with bags and strollers. A man in a bear suit waves at her. Harriet still can’t see a sign for Walmart but doesn’t want to attract attention by asking for directions. As she walks she peers in store windows, scouting for the turquoise hat. Outside a camera store, a crowd watches a demo for a video camera. Trent bought a video camera years ago to record Irwin’s first arrival home from the hospital. Everybody else had video cameras, so Harriet thought her dad buying a video camera meant her family would start being like everybody else’s. When Irwin had to keep returning to the hospital, Trent put the video camera in his closet.

  Finally she spots a sign pointing to Walmart and picks up her pace, pushing past an old lady using a walker who demands, “What’s the hurry?” A well-fed family munching on waffle cones lingers in Harriet’s path, but they don’t look happy. She doesn’t know if anybody really is happy because people lie. She has seen her mother, barely conscious due to lack of sleep and food, assure people she’s “fine.” Gennedy tells people things are “tootin’.” Her father tells Harriet he loves her even though he won’t let her stay with him because he and Uma are in the middle of a cycle. Harriet’s not sure why he doesn’t like her anymore, whether it’s her fault, Uma’s or the bicycle’s. Maybe all three but certainly the new bike has something to do with it, consuming her father’s time as he participates in bike meets with other forty-something men in bicycle shorts, tight nylon T-shirts and helmets that hide their thinning hair.

  Last year when Harriet asked if she could have a new bike for her birthday, Trent said there was nothing wrong with her old one, that they should wait for her to grow a little more before they replaced it. Already he’d adjusted the seat as high as it would go, forcing Harriet to hunch over the handlebars. Then he went and bought himself a new bike even though he’d stopped growing and already had a perfectly good bike.

  A whiskered old man in a Walmart smock grabs her arm. “Where are you off to, little miss?”

  “I’m getting my grandmother. She’s buying shoes.”

  “You’re going the wrong way, munchkin.” He points in the opposite direction.

  “Thank you.”

  She checks both aisles of the ladies’ shoes section but does not see Mads. Her loose joints wobble as she sits on a bench. “Imagine” plays on the sound system and resignation seeps into Harriet. She is lost, Gran is lost. She feels like she did when she fell from the tree, calm, even though she knew she was dying. She travelled backwards in time as she lay staring up at the rustling leaves, to before Irwin was born, when her parents took her to Niagara Falls to stay at the Americana. Under the tree, she felt no pain—it was as though she were floating in the pool at the Americana, with her arms hooked around a noodle, looking up at the cloudless sky and thinking how wonderful everything was because, after swimming, the three of them would walk down Lundy’s Lane and order club sandwiches with fries. She could have chocolate fudge cake, ice cream, whatever she wanted. It was heaven as she lay unmoving under the tree, feeling as though she were floating in the Americana’s pool, and she didn’t fear death until pain knifed up her leg and into her back, pain so severe she must have started screaming because her father was suddenly above her, looking as though he didn’t know what to do. This scared Harriet because he usually knew what to do.

  A mother on a smartphone sits her little boy on the bench beside Harriet and pushes his feet into running shoes. “How do those feel?” she asks. The boy stays focused on his Game Boy and the mother says to the phone, “It had philosophy. That’s what I loved about it. I mean, they showed shoes being made by children in Vietnam.” She finishes tying up his shoes. “Walk around, Cameron. See how they feel.” The boy hops off the bench and trots up and down the aisle, still riveted to his Game Boy.

  “How do they feel, Cammy?”

  The little boy shrugs.

  “Let me feel your toe.”

  Harriet is no longer floating at the Americana but trying to remember the last time her mother felt her toe. Gennedy takes her shoe shopping and always checks prices before she can try anything on.

  After she fell from the tree, her mother looked at her as lovingly as she looked at Irwin. While they waited in Emerg, the pain subsided but Harriet pretended it still hurt. Her mother stroked her hair and rubbed her back, calling her “my precious angel.” She didn’t once mention Irwin. Until X-rays revealed nothing was broken.

  People of all nationalities and sizes crowd the passport office. An elderly man in a uniform asks Harriet if she’s looking for someone.

  “An old man,” she says. “He came to get his passport renewed. He was with my grandmother and now I can’t find her so I’m trying to find him.”

  The elderly man scans the waiting area, scratching behind his ears. He looks Filipino, which reassures Harriet because Filipinos don’t make her feel stupid. Mr. Rivera tells his relatives that Harriet is very smart and an artist. He pestered her to show him her paintings until, finally, she brought down a portrait of Gennedy. Mr. Rivera raised his eyebrows and said, “Ganun! ” and “Galing! ” which are words that mean awesome in Tagalog.

  “Can you tell me his name?” the man in the uniform asks.

  “Jed. I don’t know his last name. He’s friends with my grandmother.” Harriet can see that Jed is not sitting in the waiting area but hopes that the man in uniform will be able to page him in a corridor, or maybe even the toilet. Jed makes frequent toilet stops.

  “Not to worry,” the Filipino says. “You sit here and rest.” He points to his chair and walks to a counter to speak with a Chinese lady, who scrutinizes Harriet then nods and picks up a phone. “Is there a Jed waiting here, please?” she inquires. “Would Jed please come to reception immediately, please?” The Chinese lady and the Filipino scan the waiting area. She repeats the message, and they glance around again before looking at each other, then at Harriet. She knows they are about to report her to someone who will call her mother. This will get her and Gran into even more trouble. She bolts for the elevators.

  Back in the concourse of the Scarborough Town Centre, she tries to blend with the moviegoers. They all belong to somebody. They separate to buy popcorn, or use the washrooms, but are soon drawn together again like magnets.

  She hasn’t been to a movie since Irwin seized at Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. They had to stop the movie. The adults in the audience tried to look as tho
ugh they felt sorry for Irwin, but the kids booed, called him Frankenstein and stamped their feet. Harriet shouted “Shut up!” at them until Lynne grabbed her arm and said, “Just ignore them.” Lynne always advises Harriet to just ignore cruel, rude and ignorant people, as though they can be ignored.

  She counts her quarters; not enough for a drink, but at least the theatre lobby is air-conditioned.

  While Irwin was convulsing in the aisle, with Lynne and Gennedy on their knees beside him, a blubbery woman, clutching popcorn, wouldn’t stop staring. Harriet barked at her.

  “Please don’t bark, Harriet,” her mother said. “Just ignore her.”

  Harriet curled her hand under her chin and flicked it at the blubbery woman the way Mr. Tumicelli in 305 taught her. “Oh for Pete’s sake,” the woman said.

  “Him too.” Harriet flicked her hand again and waved her arms to push back the gawkers. “We need air here, move back.” An usher who looked like a boy but was wearing aqua, sparkly nail polish joined her in the arm waving. His nails glinted and Harriet decided to match their colour later. It was while she was mixing the aqua that it occurred to her that during seizures the real Irwin was trying to free himself of Irwin’s body. The real Irwin didn’t want to stay cooped up inside a stick body with a ballooning head. If they let Irwin die, the real Irwin would be free to join other spirits in the transmigration of souls, just like Mr. Bhanmattie in 410 said. Mr. Bhanmattie is from India and meditated with the Beatles. “The soul, after death,” he explained, “can be reborn in the body of another human, an animal or some other creature, once, repeatedly or infinitely, according to the quality of the life one has lived. It is a give-me-another-chance doctrine.” Irwin’s soul is probably tired of Irwin’s body and wants another chance in a bird or a deep-sea creature.

  When Lynne came home from the hospital on weekends to do laundry, she recounted other patients’ tragedies. The parents of a hydrocephalic baby girl with a malignant brain tumour wouldn’t let her die. They agreed to every medical intervention, making the baby’s last days torment. When her heart repeatedly failed and the medical team asked the parents if they should keep trying to resuscitate her, the parents said yes. The baby’s ribs were broken by the hand compressions, and she was bloated unrecognizably from steroids. When her kidneys stopped functioning, she needed an immediate surgical intervention to connect her to a dialysis machine. The mother was screaming, “My baby! My baby!” Even after the baby’s heart stopped beating for twelve minutes, the parents wanted them to keep compressing her chest. “They should have let her go,” Lynne said. Like it was that easy, like she could ever let Irwin go. Harriet told her father this story, hoping to remind him how lucky he was to have a healthy daughter. “Why does your mother tell you stories like that? It’s morbid.”