After You've Gone Read online

  Before long I decided I did need to call someone. So I called Darlene. After all, why should dear Darlene enjoy herself when she could share in this horrendous grief?

  “Darlene?”

  “Lita, is that you?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “So, what’s up?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “What do you mean? Who’s dead?”

  “Bill.”

  “Bill?”

  “Yes. You know, our Bill.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Darlene, would I call you up to tell you my husband is dead for a joke?”

  “What happened?”

  “He froze to death last night.”

  She made a sound like an animal, something awful to listen to. Briefly, I thought about hanging up. I stayed on the line, though, and listened to her yowl for some time. Should I say something?

  After a while, I did hang up after all.

  I tried numerous times after the policeman dropped me off to call Steve, but he wasn’t around. He was the only person I could think of talking to right then, and I wasn’t sure how much I could talk anyway, even with him. Then I decided I’d better call Ian, Bill’s brother. I knew I should call my mother-in-law, too, but decided to let Ian deal with it. I could count on him, he was much more reliable than Bill was in many ways. After I told him the news he said he would go over and tell Mary and then come by to check on me. While I waited for him, I tried Steve again and then thought about calling Lena, letting my family know through my sister. But every time I thought about telling someone again, I didn’t know if I could, didn’t know if I had the strength to go over the story again when I could barely comprehend it myself.

  Ian must have stayed with Mary for a time, but I had no idea how long. Time was strange that day. When he arrived, he looked tired. Neither of us said anything at first. He held me close for a minute and I rested my cheek against his grey wool coat, realized how good it felt to have someone to lean on.

  “Do you mind if I turn a light on?” he asked. It struck me again how much Ian looked like Bill. His hair was blond and he was shorter than Bill, but they had the same long face, the same eyes. It hurt to look at him.

  “No.” I hadn’t noticed it was dark. The day had passed in a blur. I could not tell when I had got back from the morgue, or what time I’d talked to Darlene or to him, but that was all I’d done since I got back except have some tea.

  Ian sat on the couch and I sat on the chair across from him. We looked at each other, didn’t know what to say, where to begin.

  “Do you want a drink?” I asked. “I don’t even know if I have anything.”

  “You sit. I’ll find it.”

  “Bill might have some scotch in the cupboard beside the fridge.”

  He brought drinks, I didn’t know what they were.

  “How’s your mum?” I asked.

  He shook his head and sighed. “I’ll go back over there later tonight, probably stay with her. She’s not doing very well. How are you?”

  “I don’t know, Ian. I don’t know.”

  “It’s a hell of a thing. What was he doing?”

  “I guess he tried to get in. I wasn’t here, I had no idea he was coming. And by the time I got back he’d already wandered away.”

  “What was going on with you two? I mean, I know he’d moved out, but I couldn’t understand it. He didn’t ever say what the trouble was. He told me it was just temporary.”

  Temporary? “He never told me it was temporary. One day he just told me he was going to live with Darlene . . . ”

  “I’m sorry, Lita. I’m sorry. This isn’t the time to talk about that.”

  Ian stayed for a while that long, strange night. He said he’d call me the next morning and help with the arrangements. Probably Mum would want to help with that, too, he said. After he left I tried Steve once more and still got no answer. I sat for a long time and looked at the drink Ian had poured on the little coffee table, the ice in it long melted. I thought a long time about that word temporary and what Bill might have meant when he said it. Over the next weeks and months I would think about it a lot. I never have come to a conclusion.

  Eventually I switched off the lights. But before I did, I poured the contents of my glass down the sink. Right then, a drink was about the last thing in the world I wanted.

  I went to bed but didn’t sleep much. I wept, ranted some. Mostly I lay there and stared at the cracks in the yellowed ceiling. Sometimes I dozed off for a little while, got some blessed if brief respite from the thought that my husband was dead. But every time I woke up it was the first thing that came into my mind. It grabbed me by the throat and shook me.

  Sometime about dawn I slept for a couple of hours. When I woke again the thought came to me but not as a slam in the head like it had all night. It was more that I felt the weight of it settled on my chest. I opened my eyes all the way. I got out of bed, made some coffee, lit a cigarette. There were only three cigarettes left in the package. I would have to buy some, soon. How, how could I go out of the house and talk to people after what had happened? Wouldn’t they all know, wouldn’t they all say, “There’s the woman who locked out her husband and let him freeze to death”? I didn’t know how I’d ever be able to face anything again. There it was again, that shame. Like the shame I felt after my father died.

  I drank my coffee and smoked my remaining cigarettes, and then I had to go out and buy more. I washed my face and dressed, walked down to the corner store. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The little old woman at the counter didn’t say anything unusual, didn’t look at me funny or anything. I wondered on the way back how the world could be so much the same, like nothing had even happened.

  Once I got home I picked up the newspaper, shocked that it wasn’t on the front page: “Singer Bill MacInnes Freezes to Death While Estranged Wife Visits Lover.” I looked through the whole paper, but there was no mention of it anywhere. Then I got to the obituaries. An obituary would have to be written, it dawned on me. How could I do it? What would I say in it?

  Some time after that Ian and his mother came over. Mary’s face was swollen from crying, her eyes and nose were red. I hadn’t seen her in months, not since Christmas. She put her arms around me and I thought she wanted to comfort me, but then she pulled back.

  “Why were you out that late at night?” she asked. “Were you working at that bar again?”

  “I have to work. Bill left me.”

  “If he did leave you, I’m sure it was because you drove him away. And besides, that’s what comes of your cheap behaviour. Do you think I don’t know about how you lived in my house while I was in Toronto? Do you think my neighbours didn’t keep an eye on you two? No wonder he lost interest if you just gave it away.” She almost spat the words.

  Ian took his mother by the upper arm. “Mum. Don’t do this.”

  She looked at him a moment and then looked back at me. Her little round face had hardened into a knot, but I almost thought I saw the hint of a smile for a second. Perhaps she enjoyed the thought of hurting my feelings. Only this rant didn’t hurt my feelings, it just disgusted me.

  As it turned out I didn’t have to do much when it came to the arrangements. Bill’s mother took care of the funeral, and I asked Ian to write the obituary. I couldn’t do any of it, could barely do anything at all those first few days, besides smoke. I might as well stick with something I’m good at, I figured.

  It took a long time, years, actually, before I stopped seeing Bill around. In the early days after he died it happened all the time. I’d see a man on the street and, for a split second, the look of the back of his neck or the way he wore his hat would make me think it was Bill, and I’d be ready to rush up to him when I’d realize it wasn’t him. Sometimes I’d have to look for a minute, and it scared me. Not so much the idea that I might have seen a ghost, but the thought that I was losing my mind.

  Because for a while I was sure I was losing it. For
a time I lost my old self and became the Widow, the person overwhelmed by grief. I felt many things about Bill then, among them a deep anger. Not so much anger at his leaving me, but anger over his death. Anger over his death turning me into someone who could barely make it down to the corner store to buy a newspaper without weeping.

  I had some black times in those early weeks after I lost him, make no mistake. One miserable day in April it poured with rain all day, which turned to snow after sunset. By 7 PM it started to look like a blizzard, started to remind me too much of the night Bill died. Alone in our house, surrounded by our things, I poured myself a glass of wine and switched on the radio to find something to distract me. I listened to Amos ‘n’ Andy for a while, then switched it to Burns and Allen. They did nothing for me, only made my mood worse. How could I have even found these shows funny before? I had another glass of wine and looked at my guitar case for a while. But I couldn’t bear to bring the National out, to even think of playing it. As I watched the snow pile up on the windowsill, watched the odd car or streetcar go by on Dewdney Avenue, my mood grew blacker. So black I wondered what would become of me. What was the point in living anymore? I couldn’t help but think of my father then.

  That night I had a dream that I have never forgotten. I dreamt that I was outside in the storm — cold, lost, terrified. Snow swirled around me in every direction and I couldn’t see where I was going, couldn’t see anything. Then from out of nowhere a little boy appeared and stood in front of me. That is, I felt that it was a little boy. I couldn’t tell for sure. He looked to be about three or four years old, all dressed in white. My fingers ached to reach out and touch his curly hair, which seemed to be glowing red, then gold, then brown, then even some pink tones. He said nothing, only smiled at me. I felt a deep calm looking at him, and my fear melted. Without saying a word, he made me feel everything would be all right, somehow.

  The next morning I thought of the dream over and over. Was the child a ghost? An angel? A child I’d known at some point? I thought of my sister Hana. She’d died when I was too young to remember her, but I had a feeling this child was a boy, I was sure of that for some reason. I wondered if it might be a son I’d have one day. Or maybe it was just a silly dream. Maybe, but a voice inside me said it was important.

  My grief gradually eased. I thought it was great when I could go out and not burst into tears if I encountered a rude salesclerk or heard a sad piece of music. Music was terrible. There were certain songs, hearing them was like a punch in the stomach, like “What’ll I Do?” And being able to talk about Bill to acquaintances without tears was a milestone. For many years things would still hit me, usually unexpectedly, and almost take me down. Once, only a couple of years ago, I turned on the heat for the first time after the summer, and the smell of dust burning in the furnace, strong, strange, immediately put me in mind of the dusty Quonset we used to practise in back in the 30s, and I had to sit and weep. I hadn’t expected to feel that way more than sixty years later, but there you are.

  Eventually I began to forget what he looked like. My memories of Bill became blurred. Such forgetting would have seemed ridiculous to me before he died, but all the same it happened. I’d take out his pictures to sharpen the details. Ah, yes, of course, this is what he looked like. What did his voice sound like? I puzzled over that. Of course I remembered the words he said to me, but what did his voice really sound like? Unfortunately, the only recordings the Syncopation Five made were the two where Darlene sang with him. I didn’t want to hear them for a long time.

  When I did eventually listen to the record many years later, it surprised me. I felt tense, a little angry, perhaps, during the intro of side one and until the singing started. But I melted when it struck me how young Bill sounded. When he died I was nineteen, and before long I reached twenty-four, an age he never attained. That was strange. Since he was older than me, I’d assumed he had wisdom, judgment, experience, but once I surpassed his final age it began to dawn on me that perhaps Bill didn’t really possess these qualities I’d invented for him, or least not to the degree I’d imagined. And I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the record until I was almost forty-two. It was made when Bill was twenty-two, and there I was over twenty years later, with this vast gulf of years I’d lived, and there he was crooning away with that silly bitch Darlene about love. Now they were both long dead, and I sat and listened to their long-ago voices on a record, and sucked on my thumb. So, obviously it upset me, but not in the way I expected it to. I’d expected to sob and carry on and all that. What I really felt was a keen awareness of the waste of it all. His death was a waste, what happened to our marriage was a waste. I didn’t even notice what I sounded like on the record, I realized, after the needle had been popping in the groove at the end for some time. I thought about playing it again just to listen to myself, but it didn’t seem worth it.

  Seventeen

  Lita

  March 1937

  MARCH OF 1937 WAS FRIGID, AND Regina got a lot of snow, maybe more than we got all the rest of that winter. The calendars from drugstores or insurance companies always amused me. Litho’d in USA, they said. No kidding. March would have a picture of an oriole singing on a branch of magnolia blossoms. Of course a picture of Regina in March would be bloody depressing, something an insurance company probably wouldn’t want to distribute to its customers.

  One thing helped to take my mind off Bill. I discovered a little after he died that I was going to have a baby. Almost lost to my grief, I found out I was carrying this new life, with no idea whether the father was Bill or Jake. Actually, when I thought about it a bit, Jake seemed likelier. After all, Bill and I were married a year, and not once was there ever a sign that I might be pregnant. Of course, by the end of that year, we weren’t together that many times. But as it happened I’d been with both of them in December.

  It wasn’t so much that I’d wanted to have a baby with Bill, I was just surprised it hadn’t happened. Other women I knew, like my sister Lena for instance, seemed to get pregnant as soon as they got married, or before, even. But I didn’t really think about it that much. Bill and I were busy, and happy with the way things were, at first. I figured it would happen someday later, someday when we’d settled down a bit. I knew I wanted to have children sometime. But now it was happening I was afraid I wasn’t ready for it.

  The early days of my pregnancy were pretty awful sometimes. Something compelled me to sit and read the funeral programme over and over. In Memoriam William James Cameron Stuart MacInnes. Eventually I memorized it, could have recited it word for word. What I hoped to divine from staring at those words, I didn’t know. I still struggled to accept the facts they represented. Then I’d remember the baby, remember it was time to eat or drink something, or go to bed. Many times, though, something made me think: this baby will save me. Maybe there really wasn’t a better time for me to have a child. I thought often of the dream I’d had of the little boy. I must have known at some level that I was pregnant, and that little boy was the child I was bearing. It both pleased me and scared me a little to think that.

  When I started to show, I told Jake I needed to quit working.

  “You can stay as long as you want to, you know. I won’t ask you to leave.”

  “I know that. And I appreciate it. But I think it’s time I quit.”

  “What if I could find you something in the office? Maybe at the switchboard.”

  I smiled, shook my head. “I can’t imagine being able to learn something new right now. My mind just seems to be somewhere else. And I’m tired all the time, too.” I didn’t tell him serving drinks was the worst part. I couldn’t keep my mind off Bill when I was at work, wondering if the drink I was mixing would be the one that pushed the next guy off the edge and into the morgue. It got to me.

  “Well, sure. I understand. If you ever need anything, just call.”

  Jake tried to give me some money, then, but I wouldn’t take it. He did come by with my final pay envelope a week lat
er, though, and after he left I discovered he’d tucked a fair deal of extra cash in with it. I didn’t protest. My expenses were small, since I did have a paid-for roof over my head, but still, I had to eat.

  When I was about six months along, Steve asked me if I wanted him to contact Bill on the other side. Steve had been wonderful, better than any sister could have been. He seemed to know how tired, how miserable, I was, and he’d often come by and cook dinner, keep me company in the evenings, tell me what he’d found out about Gypsies. He was apprenticing at an auto shop, and spent a lot of time at the library and at my place.

  “Sure. I have a thing or two I’d like to tell him.”

  “All right. Well, I’ll need a belonging of his. Do you have one of his shirts or shoes, something like that?”

  “Steve. I thought it was a joke.”

  “No. I told you, I’m working on becoming a shaman. I’m kind of apprenticing with someone from the British Gypsy Lore Society. And it turns out Henry’s got a cousin who’s studying to be a shaman. I met him last summer, and he had a lot of good advice. I guess it’s a family thing.”

  “I doubt Henry’s cousin is a Gypsy.”

  “It doesn’t matter. He’s a shaman. Or a shaman-in-training. Another apprentice. Anyway, I think I’m ready to try and contact someone. It can be Bill, if you want.”

  “I don’t know. What would you have to do?”

  “I need something of his to hold and then I go into a trance. When I come out of it, I should be able to tell you what he said, if I can contact him.”

  I thought it sounded creepy. “I don’t think so. I think it might upset me too much right now. You know.”

  “Yeah, sure. I understand. But you let me know if you change your mind.”

  I was never actually sure if I had morning sickness. I did feel nauseated, off my food, unable to concentrate, but couldn’t tell how much of it was actual morning sickness and how much was nerves. Morning sickness or mourning sickness? Most days I felt a rapidly fluctuating mixture of excitement, dread, nervousness, grief, and anger. Anger, mostly at Bill, because of so many things: for being a stupid ass and getting himself killed, for leaving me alone to bring up a baby. More than that, what should have been a happy time I now remember as a mostly dark, frightening place in my life. Even at the time it didn’t seem fair, or right.