Believe Me.

Patricia Pearson.

For Clara and Geoffrey.

The loves of my life.

1.

Lately, I've been thinking about death.

Actually, I haven't.

I don't like to think about death. Whenever the subject of death springs to mind, the two thoughts that form in my brain are scary, and go away. It's my son, Lester, who has been thinking about death, and he has been asking me all sorts of practical questions.

"How do people get to Heaven, do they walk?"

He tossed out this particular query from the back seat of our rented Pontiac Firebird while we were driving to the Cape Breton Regional Hospital to visit his granny, who had told him two days previous-tremulous, clutching a rosary-that she expected to be in Heaven soon with her husband, Stan. This is not the sort of thing that I would generally encourage grandparents to say to five-year-olds, particularly when their mother has not yet prepared them for the concept of finite existence. But Lester took from it what he could, which is to say nothing, beyond the idea of Heaven itself as a new destination. Now Earth consists of four places: our summer cottage, Toronto, Cape Breton and Heaven.

The North Atlantic wind was buffeting the car, so cold that my earlobes were still throbbing in spite of the car's heater and I could barely keep my shivering hands still on the wheel.

"No, I don't think they walk to Heaven," I replied.

In truth, I haven't got the faintest idea how people get to Heaven. I have never read the Bible. Nor the Talmud, the Koran or the Tibetan Book of the Dead. If any of them have specified the transit route to the afterlife, I am simply unaware. So.

"They float," I told Lester, experimentally.

"They float?" He sounded awed. We pa.s.sed Dana, my mother-in-law's cousin, who was shuffling along the icy sidewalk, head to the wind, with a bag of Kentucky Fried Chicken in the crook of her arm. I slowed down to wave. She pointed emphatically to the bag, and then uphill toward the hospital, indicating that she was on her way to deliver the contents to Bernice.

"Great," I mouthed to her, nodding.

"Do they float in the lake?" Lester asked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"When people go to Heaven, do they have to wear a life jacket?"

"No, they-I don't think they float on water, Lester, they float in the air. They don't float like fish, they float like leaves. Except up."

"Where, up?"

It's the follow-up questions that nail you. You can get away with fairly preposterous theories when you're talking to a five-year-old, but you have to have thought them through. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the probable existence of elves: these are lines of inquiry that I've rehea.r.s.ed. "Ah, the Tooth Fairy. Yes, she's very special, Lester," I was able to explain recently, when his friend Clarence turned up at the Tweedle Dee Daycare with a gap in his front teeth. "She wears a cloak of maple leaves and builds little castles made of teeth-deep in the forest. She'll leave coins under your pillow if you place your tooth there."

Ever since, Lester has been planning what to do with his windfall, and I have been silently adjusting the figure for tooth-fairy leavings depending upon what he envisions. Fifty cents doesn't buy much any more, but $4.99 is enough to snag a two-inch plastic hadrosaur at the Museum of Nature.

G.o.d is a different proposition entirely.

"I don't know where, exactly, they float," I conceded to my son. "n.o.body knows, honey. The stairway to Heaven is a secret pa.s.sage that only the dead can find."

For a moment I marveled at this impromptu theology until it hit me that I'd copped it from Led Zeppelin.

Lester was stuffing his nose into his ski mitt.

"Are we there yet?" he asked.

What saves you in the end is the fact that five-year-olds have no attention span.

"Don't worry, little goose," I said, because this one I knew: "We'll be there soon."

We were there, in fact, a minute later, for New Waterford is a teensy town on an enormous island in the North Atlantic, connected to mainland Nova Scotia by a single causeway. When I first came here with my boyfriend Calvin, more or less direct from New York City, I was amazed at the remoteness of the place, and further awed by the presence of malls. I could barely comprehend how piles of Mexican bananas and John Grisham novels could wend their way so far into the wilderness. Geography ought to have cast the island culturally adrift. Perhaps in some ways it had. Certainly nowhere else in North America had I seen fire hydrants painted as Smurfs.

The town Calvin comes from is inhabited by unemployed miners and their wives, all of whom work at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital serving tomato soup to the eldest of the unemployed miners, or next door at the Maple Hill Manor, serving soup to the eldest of the miners' wives. New Waterford was once a thriving community made prosperous by the Dominion Coal Company, which hired strapping young Acadians and Gaelic-speaking Scots to exhaust the motherlode while they sang. In the evening, they joined together to play their fiddles and accordions. At some point, as the mines closed and the miners began to pay for their careers with their lives, the business of the community shifted. Now, if you want to work here, your best bet is to learn how to give sponge baths.

As we got out of the car, I saw Dana's sister Janey trot through the squat brick hospital entrance and dart across the parking lot. I waved. She didn't see me, but waving is very important in New Waterford. I learned this on my maiden visit, when Calvin brought me to meet the unexpected grandparents of our unplanned child. I discovered that waving was far more essential than knowing who anyone was. Not waving signaled that you-the stranger, the New Yorker, in my case, for that was where I was living when I got pregnant-think you're too good for them. That you're stuck-up. A sn.o.b.

In fact, I feel quite the opposite here. I worry that Calvin's relations and all of their friends secretly think I'm inferior. Inept at baking, lousy at bingo, ill informed on the subjects that matter-like G.o.d, good coffee and how to craft doilies. Luckily, New Waterford folk are very kind, provided that you wave, and they have been a wonder in their care for my ailing eighty-year-old mother-in-law.

Bernice's condition has proved vexing to diagnose. It was clear when I arrived on Sunday night that she could neither walk nor breathe, which to me suggested something along the lines of dying. But I had no experience with serious illness-hats off to the hardy genes of Highland Scots, from whom I descend. "I got asthma and it's swellin' up my legs," Bernice explained, when she called Calvin a couple of weeks ago at our rented Toronto duplex. "Love a G.o.d, Calvin, this hospital is gonna be the death of me, they're makin' me eat fried baloney for lunch! Those nurses, they don't know what they're doing, they're just stuffin' me full a pills and needles. They don't know what they're doing."

"Well, what does Dr. Richardson say?" Calvin asked, hunched over on one of our mismatched kitchen chairs with his right hand covering his eyes.

"He's no use, the old goat," Bernice grumbled. "He don't even come in here, he's playing golf."

"It's December, Mum, he can't be playing golf."

"Darts, then. He don't come around, he's no use a'tall. My feet are all blown up. Can't fit my slippers."

Calvin sank lower in his chair and sighed. He refused to speculate with Bernice about what ailed her. He had an unwritten rule. Never speak of death to the possibly dying. Certainly not when the possibly dying refuse to acknowledge that they really are quite possibly dying, but keep insisting instead that they are back in hospital for the tenth time in two years with "a breathing spell," which, in itself, makes them constantly tearful. The merest hint in your voice suggesting a graver predicament prods them to half-shout, half-sob: "You think I'm done for, don't you!"

It's very tricky with Bernice.

Easier talking to her doctors, surely. I a.s.sumed that, when I got here, it would be a straightforward matter of saying, "So, what's going on?" Whereupon somebody in the medical profession would say, "Well, we have conducted 106 tests and the results tell us conclusively that Bernice has asthma and it's swelling up her legs."

But it turns out that if the patient herself cannot tell you what's going on, it is remarkably difficult to find out from doctors, who flee down the corridor like startled deer whenever someone they don't recognize approaches. And, without the nod from Dr. Richardson, the nurses were only prepared to divulge Bernice's moods, which ranged from "pretty good" on Monday, to "not so good" on Tuesday, with Wednesday as yet unknown.

Lester and I stamped into the pale-blue lobby, bringing the wind with us through the revolving door so that it ruffled the pages of Sue's magazine on the reception desk and prompted her to sit up straight and rub her arms.

"'Brrrr. How ya doin'?" she called, tamping down the magazine. "Dana was just in, hon."

Sue rarely needed to say, "May I help you?" as if she didn't know who she was addressing, which was a very sweet part of this deal. The New Waterford hospital was more like a club for hypochondriacs and dying people than a formal medical inst.i.tution. The whole town was like a communal living room-the KFC, the drugstore, the Tim Hortons. By contrast, Torontonians had a tendency to pretend that they had never seen each other in their entire lives, even if they ran into one another daily. It had been puzzling me lately, for instance, that the guy at my local Starbucks persisted in acting as if he had no idea who I was, and could not antic.i.p.ate that I would order my entirely predictable vanilla latte. I had started wondering if I should walk in one day with my hair shampooed into a stiffly lathered rhino horn, just to see if he said, "Oh, you've changed your look."

The hospital lobby was quiet today, and you could tell Sue was up for a chat, but Lester had already said "Abracadabra," and reached up to push the elevator b.u.t.ton. When the steel door creaked open, he darted in and whirled around, ready to say abracadabra again as we exited, obliging me to chase after him. The elevator lurched. I looked at the same Bingo for Breast Cancer fundraising notice that I'd been reading all week-the way at Bernice's house I kept absently perusing a framed needlepoint picture of a chubby kitten saying "Jesus is Purr-fect."

"Hi, handsome," said Barbara when we walked out onto the second floor. She bent down to squeeze Lester's nose. He covered it with his mitts and peered at her guardedly. Barbara straightened up, smiled indulgently, and smoothed her white nurse's tunic.

"Bernice is pretty good today, hon," she told me, resolving the mystery of Wednesday. "Ate up all her breakfast this mornin'."

We walked into Room 12, and found Bernice in her bed, picking at a KFC drumstick and gingerly slurping Ensure. Lester pulled off his hat and flung it carelessly to the floor. Then he jutted out his arms scarecrow-style so that I could yank off his jacket. He studied his granny in her bed for a beat, and then asked her when she was going to die.

"In fifteen minutes?"

I prepared to drop to my knees and crawl out of the room unnoticed, but Lester was gazing at Bernice with such marvelous solemnity that it made her laugh, which plunged her into a coughing fit. She held her plump fist to her mouth and heaved herself onto her side, the pale-green sheet sliding off her hump of a back until her rayon nightie-lavender, extra large-was visible down to the hip. After clearing her throat a few times to be sure, she regained her composure and replied hoa.r.s.ely, "No, G.o.d love us, dear. Not in fifteen minutes, I still haven't had my dessert."

She gave her silver rosary a perfunctory rub, and then reached over to the metal bedside table to grasp at a bag of gumdrops. Bernice and Lester have a very similar diet, I'd come to notice, except that one of them opts for savory junk, and the other for sweet. I suppose Bernice had been obliged by the sheer dreadfulness of hospital food to confine herself mostly to candy. It is one of life's enduring mysteries that the medical establishment can be so pompous about obesity and cancer and heart disease and their relation to diet, and then feed hospital patients meals with the nutritional value of J-Cloths.

On Monday morning, Bernice had lifted the plastic lid that covers plates on hospital trays-providing a little frisson of intrigue in the boring days of the chronically ill-and discovered a single slice of fried Spam. Inexplicably, this curled strip of lunch meat came accompanied by a tiny paper cup filled with brown sugar. To wash it all down she had received some tepid tap water in a cup, and a sad little tea bag.

We stared at this breakfast for a very long time, trying to determine its meaning. Had the hospital cooks given up serving toast, on account of the fact that steam-damp triangles of thin white bread invariably got boomeranged back to them from all corners of the Regional, so that the entire exercise of toasting, triangulating and serving the bread was deemed futile? Was the brown sugar supposed to be mixed into a forgotten bowl of oatmeal, or did the cooks rightly a.s.sume that Bernice wouldn't be able to digest a mush with the texture of wood pulp, so they skipped the oatmeal, yet provided the brown sugar as a sort of code, a clue to its absence? Was it a cry for help?

"Nine-one-one, how may I direct your call?"

"We are the cooks in the bas.e.m.e.nt at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital, and management is forcing us to serve our patients hay."

You will be shocked to learn, as I was, that most hospitals employ a full-time dietician. Isn't that strange? Hospitals could hire a twelve-year-old boy to organize their menus during a commercial break from Fear Factor for a fraction of the cost of dieticians, and I feel fairly certain that he would come up with the same b.u.t.tered Wonder Bread sandwich for lunch.

In any event, we waited for the food to go away, as was our custom, and then Lester and I meandered down to the kiosk in the lobby to buy the verboten fresh fruit and m.u.f.fins that had yet to make an unsolicited appearance on a hospital breakfast tray.

In the meantime, Bernice ate sweets; in addition to the gumdrops, she had caramels, jujubes, Oreo cookies and Oh Henry! bars in her drawer, among which she had strewn blood-pressure tablets and hefty red capsules meant to soothe indigestion. These, the nurses gave her every morning, and these, every morning, she hid away. Yesterday, I discovered several in her running shoes under the bed.

"Why don't you tell them you don't have indigestion?" I asked, holding up a pill. She warded me off by shaking her head vigorously and scrunching her eyes shut, but I persisted. "And if you can't swallow the blood-pressure pill, you can take a liquid form-that's what they've been giving Julia."

Julia lay one bed over from Bernice on a custom-built air mattress that inflated or deflated depending upon how sore her back was. She was ninety-three, parked at the Regional with arthritis and a broken hip, and most of the time, she reclined in eerie stillness, at least a foot higher than anyone else in the room, as if arranged atop her own sarcophagus. She was dark and hirsute and hook-nosed-and when she laughed, it was soundless, her dried-up mouth stretching at the corners as her brittle body shook.

"Go on, Bernice," she'd said yesterday, her voice a croaked whisper. "You stuff yourself so much you could eat the lamb of G.o.d, so what's wrong with a cup of Gaviscon?"

My impulse was to nod in agreement: exactly, but then I paused midway through wagging my chin. Better to stay clear of that remark? "I'll check with Barbara," I said, looking futilely around before restoring Bernice's pill to her shoe.

"Momma," asked Lester, "is the granny in that bed going to die too?"

"Jeez Louise, Les, will you stop being so morbid?" I hissed.

But Julia, sharp-eared, gave that soundless laugh of hers. I suppose it's not so frightening to be quizzed about death by a child. Not when you're Julia's age. We thirty-and forty-somethings are the haunted ones, between the very young and the very old, who would rather die than talk about it.

Here are some of the discussions I have had with my son about death: Squashed squirrel in throes of rigor mortis appears on sidewalk, looking different, somehow, than other squirrels. "Why, Momma?"

Sleeping.

Lion chews off antelope's head on Discovery Channel nature show.

Just playing.

Bambi. Mother shot. Mother absent. OH NOOOOO!

Bad men attacked mother with guns, made her ... sick.

Went to deer hospital.

Grandfather Stan dies of heart attack. Might be definitive moment to explain death to child, but Momma and Daddy postpone mentioning that it happened.

Never mind.

Indeed, Momma and Daddy noticed that their friends and aquaintances had a hard time talking about the death of Calvin's father, too. Not that it was emotionally difficult for them of course, but they didn't seem to be comfortable with the vocabulary of grief. What does one say, after all, when the rea.s.suring remark of earlier decades-"He's with G.o.d now"-can no longer be universally accepted or a.s.sumed?

"Sorry to hear about your dad, man," muttered various musicians. My mother added, ever practical: "It's important to let the sadness wash through you, Calvin, don't bottle it up." Like this was all about him, or them. There were no longer the words to suggest that it had been about Stan.

2.

"I'd better come out there, Mum," Calvin had offered two weeks ago, after Dana phoned to reinforce the message that Bernice was, indeed, hospitalized with swollen legs and who knew what else, moose pox maybe.

"Oh no, dear," Bernice had wanly protested. "No, no, no. You can't afford the air fare. Better to wait until I'm home and can make you a proper supper."

Lately, Bernice had been more adamant than ever that she wasn't too good, but that we could not, under any circ.u.mstances, come to see her. She didn't want us to witness her all swollen up and wheezing, with her white hair tufted and askew. She knew we would let her carry on this way indefinitely, shooing us off with remarks about airfare, h.e.l.l-bent on recovering her health and dignity and returning home to make meat pies. But Dana's phone call was unprecedented-who knows how she even got our number? After hanging up, Calvin and I sat at our kitchen table, he with a can of Double Diamond and me with some merlot in a juice gla.s.s. We eyed each other and allowed: here's the s.h.i.t, and here's the fan.

A prolonged silence followed. Easily five minutes. I listened to our neighbor's Great Dane barking. The couple next door began shouting, which came through the wall in m.u.f.fled sing-song tones. They're a pair of Italians who argue easily and almost impersonally, whereas Calvin and I, being equal parts repressed Catholic and reticent WASP, do not clash with angry voices. Instead, we ineffectually stab at one other with pointed looks. An escalation in conflict between us entails moving from sighs and dueling eyes to unheralded refusals to do things around the house, like washing the dishes or serving a more appetizing meal than Tuna Helper.