Eleanor Rigby (15 page)

I don’t know if I’d want to see any of this in the eyes of a daughter of mine, regardless of age. The change would be too hard to bear.

*    *    *

My return to the office was a non-event. I felt like some sort of magic rock that creates no ripple when thrown in water. Donna gophered her head over her cubicle wall and asked me how my jaws felt, and the word “Fine” was barely out of my mouth before her head bobbed down and she was on the phone with some guy selling motherboards.

I booted up and looked at my screen. My usual ritual when beginning my day had always been to count the number of days until I die based on government statistics telling me that women born in
1960
could expect to live to seventy-six. In my mind, my birthday in
203
6
has been my checkout date. This sounds macabre, but how many of us quietly do this—treat our lives like time-coded dairy products on the fridge’s middle shelf, silently fermenting beside a doomed bag of lettuce? Now, for the first time in years, I didn’t feel like checking my expiry date.

I also have another program that tells me my one thousandth birthday will fall on a Friday. My five hundredth birthday will fall on Monday. I used to have fun seeing whether or not my one millionth birthday fell on a statutory holiday. But that morning when I returned to work? I checked my birthday in a billion years, and it falls on a Wednesday, and the whole death obsession seemed a bit passé. Thinking about my death like this was, I suppose, akin to my fascination with actors portraying corpses onscreen.

Theodore and Mike from the
LAN
team came by to ask me if I wanted to join their lottery pool. I thought about this for a moment and passed.

“You sure, Liz? ‘Embittered Co-worker Goes on Lottery-Loss Bloodbath Murder Spree.’”

“I’ve had enough fate for one week.”

They looked at me blankly.

“I’ll pass.”

“Your loss.” And they were gone.

Lonely lives are filled with ritual to ward off the void of evenings spent alone, but for the first time in my life I didn’t feel this way. It took me an hour at my keyboard, doing nothing, for this to sink in. I spaced out and lost all sense of time. When I snapped out of this, I thought of all the times in my life when I’d been driving from A to B and suddenly realized I’d gone five miles with no memory of having driven them. And with that came the feeling that I got away with something. That sort of sums up my pre-Jeremy existence: arranging my life so that I could forget about it while it was happening.

The Dwarf To Whom I Report came to visit, me still staring at the computer’s empty window.

“Hello in there—”

I looked up at him. “Oh—hi, Liam.”

“Hello, Liz. Are you feeling better?”

“Pretty much.”

“How are your teeth?”

“My teeth?” I was briefly stumped. “Oh, dear—my surgery—yes, I’d forgotten it. My teeth are fine. Couldn’t be better.”

“And your week away?”

“It’s hard to tell where to begin, Liam.”
Hale-Bopp? The emergency ward?
“It’s been very full, really.”

In a conspiratorial tone he said, “Donna said you were looking swollen and bruised.”

“She would, then, wouldn’t she?”

Liam laughed. “Yes. She would.”

Liam …

Liam is short, or, rather, he’s shorter than me, and I’m short. (And yes, I’m fat and have red wavy hair.) He is a fussy man, as if he had read and taken to heart grooming advice from previous eras—old mildewed
Esquires
with articles on extinct subjects such as Richard Nixon or key parties. But I had only to look at his shoes and any aura vaporized. His shoes spoke to me, and what they said was, “$69.95.” They were made from the dull pigskin leather specific to medicine balls and dog collars. He had five discrete looks, one for every working day—and all of them subverted by shoes he probably traded at a flea market for a car battery with the cables thrown in. No. He bought them at the Metrotown mall on sale for $49.95 and thinks they’re functional. It’s just so—
Liam.
A failure of judgment at the final, most critical step.

Liam also wears a
Raiders of the Lost Ark
–style fedora. A few years back he affected a three-day-stubble look that had the girls in Data yucking it up for weeks on end.

But wait a second—wasn’t I saying earlier that physical descriptions of people are pointless? Well, yes—when it comes to the hero and heroine. I suppose that for incidental characters, description is a possibility. I’ve always felt sorry for those actors in movies and on TV whom you recognize instantly but whose name you’ll never know. They’re simply familiar, and that is the essence of their employability.

When Liam went away, I opened some files and poked at them as if they were liver and onions, and was glad when the phone rang. It was Jeremy, who’d just made his first sale. I said, “Congratulations, you little huckster.”

“It’s Ken’s last day and I wanted to impress him. It was so easy. It was this woman who had yuppie flu, or twentieth-century disease or whatever they’re calling it now. We both lay down on the Supreme Ultra-rest combo—Ken’s right, by the way, it’s all a total scam—and then it was so funny, we both fell asleep, and Ken came and woke us up after nearly an hour, and bingo, the sale was mine. And she slipped me her phone number.”

“Congratulations again. How old was she?”

“Eighty-six or something.”

“No, how old was she really?”

“Okay. Fortyish.”

“A good forty or a scary forty?”

“Good. But I got the feeling her standards are too high, so no matter how hard she tries, she always falls for the same guy.”

“I had the yuppie flu once, you know.”

“BS.”

“No, really. Ten years ago—for almost a year. Mother told me it was all in my head and wouldn’t listen if it came up. Leslie said that I should try having a kid and
then
come to her to discuss having no energy. William said I wasn’t a yuppie and that the yuppie flu is horse crap anyway.”

“But it’s not.”

“No. But I only believed it because I knew I’d had it. Otherwise I’d think it was crap too.”

“How’d you manage?”

“After every test in the book came back negative, I resigned myself to it.”

“
It?
Describe
it.”

“Waking up, feeling good for maybe ten minutes, and then feeling like a dying houseplant for the rest of the day. No energy. No nothing. I blamed everything—dairy, yeast, mineral deficiencies, lack of sunlight, too much sunlight, alcohol, Epstein-Barr.”

“What happened?”

“It just stopped one day. No reason. It just stopped.”

I could tell we were getting too close to discussing MS on the level Jeremy hated, the meat-and-potatoes symptom level, as opposed to Ken the Sleep Consultant’s ink-black humour. He changed the subject. “You know, there’s a lot to be said for having a small, manageable dream. I’m going to set the sales record for this branch. Just you watch.”

“I have no doubt.”

“Gotta go. Let’s discuss dinner later today.” He hung up.

It’s a measure of my social naïveté that when Donna gophered her head up again and asked, “Who was that?” I didn’t tell her to screw off. Instead, I said, “That was my son.”

Well, her eyes bungeed out of her skull, but she quickly roped them in. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jeremy.”

“What grade is he in?”

“No grade. He’s twenty.”

I could imagine Donna’s brain at work:
Is he Liz’s biological child or is he something else? Why has Liz been so secretive about him, until now? Twenty? Maybe he’s hot. Maybe he’s …
It was fun watching her be tortured by curiosity.

I said, “I have to finish these files right now, Donna. Let’s talk later.”

“What are you doing for lunch?”

“Oh, I have plans already.” I didn’t, but this only made her torture worse. Quite cheerfully I opened up my files and went to work, not giving a rat’s ass about what they contained. Jeremy was this new paint that had rendered me visible to the world.

*    *    *

At home after work, Jeremy and I swapped stories about our days as we ate some pasta with artichoke hearts. He’d whipped it up from scratch, and I think it was one of the happiest meals of my life. Even the smallest of life’s daily details—new toner cartridge for the copier, a faulty traffic light on Marine Drive—seemed charmed and profound. Jeremy told me about a guy who came into the store only for a nap. It was engrossing.

After this, we watched a
Law & Order
rerun on TV, heckling the program with the love and crabbiness that comes from addiction to a specific show. Mother came over shortly after nine to drop off some old clothes of William’s she thought Jeremy might like—Mother always needs a pretext for a visit. Before I knew it, I was in bed and falling asleep, content to repeat this day for a thousand years if I could.

The week melted by. It was inconsequential, yet glorious. The weather was warm, and we ate on restaurant patios.

At work, out of my newly discovered motherly concern, I phoned Social Services, to fill in some of the gaps in Jeremy’s history. It was a gamble, as they legally didn’t have to tell me anything, and I certainly wasn’t about to tell Jeremy any of this. I thought that if I didn’t call I’d feel like the sort of mother who leaves the kids playing with thumbtacks while going out to find a fix. I made a lunch appointment on Thursday to meet with Kayla, someone who actually knew Jeremy from way back, and who would bring along what knowledge she could.

We met at a Japanese place two blocks from the office. Kayla was an efficient redhead with one of those faces that looks the same at ten or forty or eighty. We sat down and wiped our hands with hot
oshibori
towels.

“From what I can gather, Jeremy was hard to place with families. He tended to get into trouble more often than not—”

“What sort of trouble?”

“There seems to have been a consistent problem of things going missing—”

“What kinds of things?”

“Not money, but small items, enough to spook the foster parents.”

I filed this away with the stories of the stolen mozzarella and the family photos. I asked Kayla if Jeremy sold items to support a drug problem, but she didn’t think Jeremy was into drugs.

“That issue never came up.”

It was a difficult lunch, because Kayla was restricted in what she could tell me and there were blocks of silence.

“What about his MS—how come you people couldn’t have helped him more?”

“He was diagnosed at seventeen, but after eighteen there’s nothing we can do. He’s an adult.”

“His families didn’t care?”

“To be honest, no. Not much.”

“And the disease can accelerate that quickly?”

“Yup.”

I wanted to grab the whole wretched foster system, Kayla included, and smush it into a ball, then step on the ball and crush it. I was furious, but there was no point in letting it show. Kayla was already pushing the rules on my behalf. It was an unsatisfactory meal by any standards, and we both knew it.

Kayla tried making a call on her cellphone, but the battery was dead, so she came up to the office to use a Landover phone. I was in the kitchen getting a coffee when I heard Jeremy walk in. He was speaking to Donna, who was at the fax machine. I looked out. “Jeremy?”

“Hi, Mom. I had the afternoon off, so I thought I’d come visit.”

“That’s wonderful. How’d you get here?”

“Cabbed.”

Donna was dazed and tripping over her words. It was interesting watching her turn into a mumbling cheerleader. Jeremy was pulling out all the stops, using what he called his “winning smile”—a rehearsed showman’s grin that instantly swung a room his way. No wonder he sold so many mattresses. The three of us made small talk. This tiny discussion defined my life’s
BEFORE
photo and its
AFTER
version. I’ve never felt so popular, before or since.

It was as the three of us were discussing box springs that Kayla came down the hall from where she’d been phoning. Jeremy turned around, saw her and collapsed on the spot.

*    *    *

What I haven’t mentioned here are Jeremy’s notes. I found them on scraps of paper around the condo, notes marred by coffee rings, phone numbers and ketchup stains. He obviously had no intention to keep or archive them; he simply blurted them onto paper and forgot them. But I saved them. I brought them to work with me, and kept them in my upper drawer along with Post-it notes, decongestant tablets, Sharpie pens and skin-tone concealer.

Jeremy’s handwriting was appalling—a scrawl, really, not that mine’s much better. Penmanship has gone the way of typewriters and vinyl records.

Here follow some of the ones I have here now, their spelling corrected …

guns shooting at loaves of breads

coyotes stumbling down an empty freeway. eyes are milk-y