Lester and I flew back out to Cape Breton when March blew in like a lion, pelting our Jetsgo airbus with frigid rain. Unperturbed by the weather, my son sipped his ginger ale and inexpertly colored a picture of Spider-man while I reflected on the last time I had seen Bernice living her life with Stan.

It had been early September-the Labor Day before last. We had all gone out together to visit, and one afternoon, Calvin took Lester to the New Waterford playground while I lay on the couch, felled by a stunning headache, with Stan sitting nearby on his easy chair and watching a ball game.

"Oh ... my ... G.o.d!"

We both heard her tremulous protest waft out of the kitchen. But Stan didn't rise from his chair, just registered her voice with a mild flinching uplift of his hand, which clutched the remote.

"Stan?"

She had come into the archway that separated sitting room from dining room, kneading the gnarled backside of her hand. Her pink terrycloth bathrobe was stained in purple blotches from her pie-making.

"Stan, the microwave's broke! There's air blowing out of it, look." She gestured backward. "I'm cooking your bacon and I can feel this little wind coming out. Oh my G.o.d. It must be radiation escaping."

"It's the way those things work, Bernice," Stan said irritably, but he got up anyway, shuffled to the kitchen in his corduroy slippers and had a look.

"Can you feel it?" she asked.

"Sure I can."

Bernice sank into a kitchen chair, plump feet crossed at the ankles, staring wanly at the floor. "Well, that's not the way it's supposed to work-why would it work that way, eh Stan? Makes no sense! Shirley says there's a sale at the mall, got herself a toaster oven for half-off yesterday. I think you should get another one, get a replacement."

"What am I supposed to do with the bacon?" he asked, peering dubiously into the gleaming white box.

"I'll just make some fresh in a pan." She raised herself, looking formless in her billowy robe. He'd make the bacon, himself, he told me later, "don't like the way she fries it, too greasy, but she won't let me. She needs to keep in motion, she says. What the h.e.l.l for? I ask her." He shook his head in bemus.e.m.e.nt. "What's she cooked already today, Fran? Eh? Two loaves of bread, strawberry pie, it ain't even mid-morning."

He retired to the bathroom with the National Enquirer. The phone rang, searing my temples, and Bernice went to answer it.

"Stanley?" she called, after a moment's conversation.

"Well, hold on there," he yelled back, "I'm in the john, not running nowhere with my pants down."

"Dr. Richardson's on the phone, I won't talk to him," she cried.

Stan came hopping out, tucking his plaid shirt into worn brown pants. "Come on, Bernice, you're waving the phone like a d.a.m.n live grenade."

It was true, I noticed from my vantage point pretending to sleep on the couch. She practically threw it at him before plopping down on a dining-room chair with her eyes squeezed shut. He held the receiver to his good ear and gazed out the window at the KFC.

"How you doin', Johnny?" He listened for a beat, then: "I'm not getting down to the hall much this year, no. I miss the games, sure I do, but it's hard gettin' out with her so nervous, you know."

Whatever Richardson told him then, I knew Bernice was expecting some blood test results, for something or other. High-blood pressure, as I recall.

"Sure, I do," said Stan. "Oh, I'll try to bring her in, sure." He sounded noncommittal. Last time they went up to the Regional, he told me, Bernice clung to the doctor's doorway like a cat about to have a bath. Occurred to him he should have brought her in a carrying cage, she was that uncooperative. Now he glanced down at his wife, at the tight little curls on her head interspersed with patches of sh.e.l.l-pink skin. I wondered what he was thinking, that she had straight hair once, straight and thick and lovely. That he missed the woman who had that hair.

"Hand me that pen there, will you, Bernice?" he asked.

She stared up at him, miserable, her mouth such a trembling upside-down crescent she was almost cartoon-ish. I felt a heated anger within me somewhere, fleeting as a spark. I hated it that you could see right through her sometimes, like you could a little kid.

After jotting something down, Stan hung up, and Bernice made herself busy again, as if the world would end if she didn't keep moving. She started poking around in the blond-brown cupboards she'd had Stan install that summer, finally pulling out a jar of flour. She whirled around, lips moving silently, heading for the fridge to see if there were any eggs left. "I got eggs," I heard her mutter, "I got oil, I got water, maybe I should put something else, I could put in some coconut maybe, like Shirley was sayin', tasted real good in brownies." She sank to her knees and started rifling through odds and ends in the side panel, maraschino cherries and such.

"Stan? Can you get down to Sobey's for bananas and some coconut, the shredded kind, comes in a little bag in the spice section, then go over to Mayflower and see about the microwave sale Shirley was telling about. And get one of them filters too, for the humidifier."

He obeyed without remark, reaching for his raincoat, patting his back pocket for his wallet. He lifted his tweed hat off the stand and slipped away.

"Stanley?" I heard the soft whuff of the door pulling shut against the wind.

Bernice knelt before her meat crisper and frantically imagined supper: meat pie or roast-Stan said he was tired of fish cakes. "What about you, Nancy? Does Lester like meat? I could do up a ham."

"Whatever's easiest for you," I called from the couch, as if ease had anything to do with it. I switched off the TV. Now I could hear Stan's favorite country music station playing on the radio in the kitchen, the little transistor spitting static and tw.a.n.g from the counter beside their new stove. A commercial announced a sale on boxsprings at Sleep Country, and then the news came on. "Hurricane Don continues to bear down on North Carolina today, with forecasters predicting landfall somewhere between Charlotte and Wilmington late this afternoon." This news provoked wide-eyed attention from Bernice. "The storm is expected to reach the Maritimes possibly as early as tomorrow," continued the radio man, "bringing gusting wind and heavy rain to coastal areas."

"Oh ... my ... G.o.d!"

The ham she'd pulled out of the fridge rolled heavily out of her lap as she heaved and floundered on the floor, scrabbling along the linoleum to hoist herself up by Stan's breakfast chair. "It's gonna flood my bas.e.m.e.nt and ruin the dryer."

I couldn't follow her logic, but her muttering became a mantra-"the dryer oh my G.o.d"-as she headed for the bas.e.m.e.nt door. I got up, my head pounding, and followed her to make sure she was okay. Down in the bas.e.m.e.nt, she was caught up wildly in frantic, c.o.c.kamamie schemes to keep things dry, yanking plugs out of the cold wall, throwing towels around, dragging at bags of gra.s.s seed as if she could sandbank the cellar, muttering her mantra, getting dizzy until finally she careened against the bottom steps and ran aground, perspiring.

"Bernice?" I ventured, hovering beside her with a towel in my hand in case she wanted me to mop her forehead, which was the least of her concerns.

She began crying, her shoulders rising and falling in shudders. "Hurricane's gonna ruin my dryer," she sobbed.

"What hurricane?" asked Calvin, suddenly behind me, halfway down the stairs. "There isn't going to be a hurricane, Mum."

"Hurricane Don!" she bellowed at him over her shoulder, righteous and grieving. "It's comin' up the coast."

"What are you talking about?" he retorted, sounding like his father. "It won't be anything to worry about by the time it gets up here. Come on, Mum, come on up. I'll make you a cup of tea." He descended the stairs to take her hand.

Later that afternoon, with Stan back and on his knees playing with Lester, Bernice had another hurricane-related revelation.

"Oh my G.o.d, the patio furniture! It'll blow around and break the windows!"

She pushed past me, wild-eyed, and headed outside, where the sea wind batted at her dressing gown and whipped her white curls. She grabbed up her plastic chairs and waved them around like a lunatic lion tamer fending off ghosts in the salt air. The pinwheels she'd planted in her marigolds spun their wings as fast as hummingbirds, backward and forward as the gusts switched directions. Her chimes kicked and danced, her b.u.t.terfly feeder bounced, the lantern held by her little black sambo swayed madly, and she seemed to understand all this as Don's approach, his menacing howl coming up the coast from Halifax.

"Bernice!" called Stan, holding open the kitchen door, with Calvin right behind him. Stan stepped outside and reached for her chairs, easing them from her grasp and storing one atop the other before carrying them across the lawn to the shed, a lock of gray hair on his forehead held aloft like a cowlick by the wind. Wordlessly, he and Calvin carted all the furniture to safety: four chairs, a table with an umbrella sticking out of it which Calvin had to cartwheel over the gra.s.s, a little side table, waterproof cushions. Then they brought in the new microwave, and boxed up the jams Bernice had made so that Stan could drive them over to the soup kitchen.

Evening came, and with it the remnants of Hurricane Don, an intemperate but not particularly ferocious squall. Bernice was in the kitchen surrounded by pans and cookbooks and a dusty cloud of flour. Her panic swelled and receded with the sound of her chimes in the yard, but she could clearly calm herself with cooking: the ham needed glazing; the potatoes scalloped just so; boiled parsnips, that would be good; and a pan of coconut brownies. She wouldn't let me help her, kept shooing me away, "Oh no, dear, no, no," stirring and slicing till her fingers ached.

Stan and Calvin, chuckling at America's Funniest Home Videos, didn't hear the surprised, protesting groan as pain grabbed her around the middle and she, in turn, grabbed for her chair. Stan ambled in on a commercial break and found her bent over, clutching a chocolatey spoon.

"Oh, Bernice," he murmured as I stood by, useless and alarmed. He leaned toward her and gently removed the spoon, carried it like treasure to the sink.

"Don't you dare call Dr. Richardson," she whispered into her lap.

"Alright, Bernice, alright." He dropped the spoon into dishwater with a hesitant, trembling hand. The wind fell quiet. On the roof, now, a steadying drumbeat of rain.

Maybe he died before she did because he had to. She wouldn't let go, wouldn't stop, until he was gone.

We switched planes in Halifax, and took the "puddle jumper" up to Sydney, a plane that vibrated and buzzed like a giant b.u.mblebee, and I tried to get a grip on my fear as Lester trustingly lay his head on my shoulder. We dropped five hundred feet in a downdraft, and I clutched discreetly at my forehead, holding Lester's hand as lightly as I could while I prayed. "Lord, in Your grace give me strength." It was a new prayer for me. I used to scrunch up my eyes on these flights and plaintively call out for rescue. But G.o.d wasn't in the business of protecting people from their own inventions. Somewhere along in this journey, I had realized that rescue wasn't G.o.d's job.

38.

"How are you, Barbara?" I asked the head nurse as Lester and I stepped out of the elevator and collided with a gaggle of pink and purple balloons.

"Oh, not too bad, Frannie!" She smiled, shifting her balloons to the other hand. "Not too bad. It's nice to see ya. Celia got out a couple weeks back, asked me to send her love to Lester." She bent over to tweak his nose. He ducked behind me and she chuckled.

"Oh," I said with genuine pleasure, imagining Celia and Jim out for a celebratory dinner at the Cranberry Nook, "that's great! I'm glad to hear about Celia. How are Julia and Aileen?"

"Julia sleeps a lot. Real quiet. You know. Aileen went home a while back, too, up to her daughter's place in Glace Bay." Barbara tugged at the tie that held her clutch of balloons, and freed a pink one for Lester. "I took her some Easter chocolates last week, they were on sale at Sobey's." She looked down at my son and handed him the balloon, which he accepted with the same surprised reverence with which I might greet a stranger handing me a thousand dollars. "Aa'll excited about the Easter Bunny I'll bet?" He nodded, solemn.

"How is Bernice, Barbara?"

"Oh, not too good, hon." She glanced down at Lester, smoothed out her uniform and chose to say nothing further about Bernice's appet.i.te, or lack thereof. "You go on and see her, hon, Calvin's there now."

I can't say, in that moment, that I had an overwhelming desire to walk down the familiar white-walled corridor, festooned though it was now with yellow chicks and fake green gra.s.s in early antic.i.p.ation of Easter. It tore through me again-rent me straight through the center-that I brought Lester with me this time. Was it careless to expose him to Bernice in her slow transformation? Would it threaten his delicately conceived cosmology, in which humans evolved into angels? This was not, I had gathered from my last call with Calvin, a simple matter of a caterpillar turning into a b.u.t.terfly. There was the benign coc.o.o.n stage to consider, which in this instance took the form of a woman swollen to the point of disfigurement, whose breath rattled.

We came to the doorway of Room 10, to which Bernice had been a.s.signed when it became clear to the nurses that she was deteriorating swiftly. The Regional had a palliative ward, but they only used it for patients who accepted that they were dying. For women like Bernice, they had private rooms on workaday wards for the family to conduct their vigils.

Calvin sat beside his mother as quiet as a schoolboy, with his hands on his knees, his expression hovering somewhere indefinable between stoic and forlorn. He had surrounded Bernice with trinkets from her house. There was the chuckwagon that I'd hidden away from Lester, and the small plastic replica of St. Anne de Beaupre that he'd plugged into the wall as a nightlight. A bingo trophy she had won, some samples of her Knit Wit, a couple of doilies that Calvin had laid out on her metal bed table, smoothed carefully beneath a paper cup of ice water and a bottle of pills.

On the wall above her sleeping head, Calvin had taped up some photographs. Lester at Halloween, costumed rather unconvincingly as a squid. Shirley and her husband at the picnic table in Bernice's garden, sipping rye and c.o.kes in the pale yellow sunshine of a Cape Breton summer. Stan, from about twenty years ago, maybe, on the cold, rocky North Atlantic beach, shoulders hunched, a c.o.c.keyed grin, body lilting to one side with his hand on his jutting hip-his "hoodlum" stance, Bernice called it. And a striking picture of Bernice herself, which must have dated from the late '40s. She was leaning on the rail of a ship with her blond hair blowing carefree around a happy and lovely heart-shaped face. She wore a swish skirt and suit, tres Princess Grace, and high heels that accentuated the slender curve of her calves. That was the woman whose fur coat I had found in the bas.e.m.e.nt, in amidst the Christmas knickknacks. I'd been wondering to whom that coat had belonged.

"Daddy!" cried Lester, running to greet his father, who was startled out of distant thoughts by his son's bright voice.

"Small young man!" replied Calvin, grinning in pleasure and reaching out his arms.

I hung back, leaning my head against the door frame, still captivated by what I saw. By the meaning Calvin had been trying to construct of his mother's life, through an a.s.sembly of all her small treasures.

"Hey, sweetie," I said as I broke my stillness and walked into the room. He stood, and hugged me, and told me everything and nothing in the clinging strength of his embrace.

39.

"Why don't you take Les for dinner at the KFC," I suggested as I set down my suitcase, loosened my coat, and noticed Lester staring at his granny. "I'll stay here with her. See if she needs anything."

"Aunt Shirley might come by," he warned, taking Lester's hand. "She and Mum are still in cahoots over Mum not dying, and Shirley's looking into a senior's apartment she wants Mum to rent."

"Okay," I said, giving him a puzzled look. "I thought they were in the opposite of cahoots. Wasn't Shirley refusing to speak to Bernice the last time we talked about it?"

Calvin shrugged and tugged Lester toward the corridor. "It seesaws," he said, grimly, and then to his son, "Come on, small young man, we are going out to dine."

I almost wailed "Don't go!" I wanted to see more of Calvin, I hungered for him. I hated, in that moment, that we had to orchestrate this now in the best interests of our child. Parenthood forced us worlds away when we needed to cling, and yet that was that. Bereft, I hung up my coat beside Bernice's terry bathrobe, and then looked around the room as if I could find something immediate and pressing to do. But there was nothing. A fan whirred quietly in the corner. The nurses, calling back and forth to one another in the hallway, sounded distant. Everything was clean and orderly. Bernice slumbered on in the bed. I sat down and stared for a long time at the pictures on the wall.

I wasn't prepared for the conversation I had with Bernice when she finally aroused from her doze.

"Hand me the blueberries, will you dear, they're in my change purse," she said.

"I beg your pardon?" Her tone was so cheerful and resolute that it felt as if we'd been shopping together at the mall.

"My blueberries, for Heaven's sake," she repeated, impatient.

I might have seen this request as delirious, but with Bernice it hovered within the realm of the possible, given her recent tendency to hide pills in her sneakers, so I checked her small embroidered change purse, which contained nothing but coins. I relayed the unfortunate news.

"Well, where are they?" she demanded. "I won't have enough for the pie."

"I'm sorry, Bernice, I don't know where they are," I said, smiling helplessly and wondering why I had to imagine conversations with past-life people and power animals, yet this was the one that was real.

She stared up at the ceiling and sighed. "No one knows nothin'."

I couldn't begin to think of a reply. We lapsed into silence and she fell back to sleep.

An hour later: "Oh, good Lord in Heaven," she cried suddenly, scrabbling for my hand, "who let the geese in here?"

"What geese?" I asked, startled.

"What do you mean, what geese?" she retorted, looking pointedly at the end of her bed. "They're waddlin' all over my kitchen! Go get me my whisk."

"Your whisk?"

"Go on!" She pushed at me, conveying such authoritative urgency that I actually stood up and started looking around for something that might resemble a whisk. "Geese don't like to be whisked," Bernice explained, "it'll scare 'em off my doilies."

At that, I did a double take, and leaned over to stroke her cheek. "Bernice," I said, gently, "there aren't any geese in here. Your doilies are fine."

"OF COURSE there's no geese," she answered, like I was insane, "what are you on about? Why would there be geese?"

"Never mind," I said, and sat back in my chair.

And on it went like this, until toward midnight, she sat up as lucid as Einstein and said, "Nancy, you're back. Thank the Lord you're here, dear, I need to go the washroom. Those nurses, you know they're no good a'taaal.'"

Never in my whole life have I been so relieved and elated by someone's need to go to the washroom. To suddenly be presented with this gift of her coherence, it was thrilling, as if, having reached a straining hand to someone who was falling from a bridge, my grip loosening, their fingers sliding, they came back at the last second with a solid, affirming grasp. Hurrah Bernice! No geese, no purse fruit, just this straightforward need to get up and pee in the bathroom and not in the bed.

I leapt to my feet and a.s.sisted her, first to a sitting position, then to slide her pale, heavy legs over and out. She hung heavily on me as we shuffled the ten long feet to the glaringly white bathroom, but it felt like running an Olympic marathon replete with cheering and laurels, for she was wholly herself, complaining the entire way.

"Look at me, I'm a fright," she grumbled, "all swollen up from asthma, feet don't fit my slippers. Oh, they're terrible to me here, Nancy, just terrible. Don't let me buy new slippers. Won't let me out. They've got me locked up like a criminal. Can't get out to the mall."

I lowered her gently onto the toilet, and when she'd finished her business, I handed her some toilet paper.

"Oh, you're a love, Nancy, I'm so sorry you have to see me like this. Can't even wipe myself."