Two September 1996
TWO
I was at work when I got the call. I was sewing up the chin of a child who’d fallen off the monkey bars at a playground and put their bottom teeth through their lip when my name came across the speakers.
A voice, made rough by the static of a microphone held too close to their mouth, called me to the nursing station.
I wanted to ignore it, but the message said it was urgent and another nurse, a student I’d seen around but hadn’t gotten to know yet, appeared before me.
“I can finish up here, you have a call.” Her name badge said DANIELLE. I don’t know why I remember that small detail out of all the things I should remember in my life, but I do. I picked the phone up off the desk and turned away from the people looking at me.
“Is this . . .” There was a long pause. “Aliet?”
“It is. What can I do for you?”
“Ms. Aliet.”
“Aliet is my first name. What can I do for you?” I repeated, almost annoyed.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news.” The voice on the other end paused and took a deep breath.
“Your grandmother has passed away. It’s my understanding that she was working in her garden this morning and a neighbour saw her fall and called the ambulance.
Unfortunately, they were unable to save her.
We believe it was a heart attack.” The line went quiet.
“I’m sorry, but do you have the right person?”
“Are you Aliet Paul? And is her name—”
“Stop, okay.”
I have seen people suffering from vertigo.
Their entire world turned upside down and they have no choice but to wait for it to right itself.
They lie perfectly still, praying that the earth won’t tilt.
They breathe long, heavy breaths, willing the crystals in their ears to move, to dislodge from the places they don’t belong and allow them to return to the land of the upright.
I had seen it, but I had never experienced it—until then.
Whether it was real vertigo or my body’s reaction to loss, I may never know.
The room began to spin, and I fell hard to the floor.
The chair that had been sitting there, waiting to catch me, wheeled away and hit the wall.
One of the other nurses came toward me, arms outstretched, but I shooed her away with my hand.
“Ms.? Hello?”
“I’m here.” I stopped to take a breath and placed my free hand on the cold linoleum floor to steady myself. The cold was comforting. “Where is she?”
“She’s at the hospital here in town. I understand that you don’t live close.”
“I’m in the city. I’ll be there in a couple hours.”
I reached over my head to the counter above me and tried to hang up the phone but missed.
The receiver hit the floor with a clang.
The high pitch of the busy signal echoed down the halls.
All I could see was the chair I’d tried to sit in as it finished its spin and settled, the seat at eye level.
Everything was quiet except that damn telephone.
People were moving, but they made no sound.
Feet shuffled past me; the heavy soles of nursing shoes looked absurd from where I sat.
And I waited for them to squeak or thump against the floor, but they were quiet.
I knew that, somewhere, machines continued to beep and patients continued to cry out, but I couldn’t hear them.
Just that ridiculous phone and my own breathing.
I swatted at the phone as it swung beside me.
“Come on, let’s get you up off the floor.” It was the head nurse. She placed her hand under my arm and helped me to my feet. Someone had replaced the receiver, and all the other sounds came back in a terrible flood of noise. I winced.
“I need to go. My Kiju, my grandmother, she’s dead.”
Such a horrible word. Dead. So short, so easy to spell and say, yet so dreadful in its finality. It felt heavy in my mouth, it didn’t belong to the person it was attached to, to my Kiju.
“She raised me. My mother died. Not today, my mother didn’t die today, she died when I was born. My Kiju. She raised me.” I didn’t know what to do except talk. To explain to people who required no explanation.
“It’s okay, Aliet. You go, be with your family. We can take care of things here. Why don’t we get someone to help you get your things together and get you to your car.”
“I walked.”
“Okay then, how about someone walks you home?”
I looked around at the sympathetic smiles.
I wondered what happened to the little girl, the one who needed her chin sewn, put back together.
Then I saw her, her chin bandaged, carrying a latex glove blown up into a giant swollen hand, a smiley face drawn in black marker.
She walked past, her other hand in her mother’s, and waved the bloated hand.
“No, that’s okay. But thank you.”
I offered a comforting smile to my colleagues, who desperately looked like they wanted to be anywhere but here.
Grief is hard to look at straight on, especially when it’s so new and unfocused.
It feels almost contagious. Looking into the eyes of the grieving only serves to remind you of your own grief, those moments of sadness stored in the past. They threaten to burst out when you make eye contact with the bereft.
As I walked away, I felt the force of the situation push back against me, willing me to go back in time to that little girl, to calm her and finish putting her back together, to unhear my name being called over the system.
But there was no going back, that’s not how time works.
We go forward whether we want to or not.
The hospital doors slid closed, my work life locked away behind me.
I never anticipated that I would be leaving for the last time.
I pulled my scarf tight around my neck, trying to hold the chill at bay as the sadness began to settle.
When the tears started, people moved around me, providing me with a wide berth for my grief.
I’d known she was going to die someday, she was old and getting older, just as I was, but knowing something is going to happen and being ready when it does happen are two completely different things. Knowing is not readiness.
It was getting dark as I walked past the parking garage and onto the city street, still busy with people leaving work, going to eat, meeting friends for drinks.
All the things people do on a Friday night.
The sun was setting in front of me as I walked quickly through the public gardens; the branches of a lazy willow dangled, ghostly in the fading light.
It must have rained earlier because the autumn leaves had fallen from their branches and lay wet and slippery.
The park gates locked at dusk, so I kept a watchful eye on the setting sun as I edged around empty flower beds and ignored the neatly manicured walkways in favour of shortcuts across equally manicured grass.
It was quiet despite the traffic that whizzed past on all four sides, the tall trees absorbing the sounds of the city.
I walked through the large iron gates just as the sun set and the three-quarters moon showed itself over the tops of the buildings.
A hawk sat untroubled on the top of a light post, ignoring the machines and people below.
When I was small, I was sitting on the lawn in an old blanket, playing with the plastic horses I’d gotten for my birthday, when I spotted a hawk looking down at me from a tree on the edge of where our garden met the woods. Kiju was in the garden and followed my gaze to see what I was looking at.
“Aliet, did you know that the eyes of the hawk are so powerful that they can see into the future, and when the hawk follows you, he is making sure you arrive at your future safe?”
Now, as I stood on the corner, I looked up and whispered, “Wela’lin,” a thank you, to the bird.
My apartment was dark and smelled mildly of the compost that was stored under the sink until garbage day. I thought of emptying it, but by the time I had packed my bag, I had forgotten. Funny how the nose so quickly adjusts to scent, even the scent of rot.
The highway stretched from the city to home through trees and more trees.
Off in the distance, every few minutes a house or the shadows of a town, but in the end I was alone.
Me, the trees, and the rhythm and hum of tires on asphalt.
The exit to the town where I’d spent my first eighteen years looked the same as it always did, but there was something different now: no expectation associated with a homecoming, only dread.
When I arrived at the hospital, Kiju was by herself in a small room, covered by a white blanket.
I wondered, briefly, if she was warm enough.
I reached under and took her hand in mine.
They hadn’t covered her face. To cover the face of the dead so soon after their passing was something that had always bothered me.
Close their eyes, yes. The eyes of the dead show nothing of who they were when they walked among the living, but the face was the way family knew them, the way they recognized that someone they loved was really gone.
That death wasn’t playing tricks. I never covered the face, or I would sneak into a room and uncover it before the family came in, to let them know that their loved one still mattered.
Her face was old, older than I remembered, the wrinkles deeper than I thought they could be, settled.
But her hands were soft, her papery skin wrinkled as I pressed my finger along the back of her hand, following blue-green veins that no longer pumped blood. I lifted one to my lips and kissed it.
“We kept her here until you arrived.”
The nurse startled me, and I turned quickly.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“No, that’s okay.”
“I remember your grandmother. She was such a nice lady. And her strawberry preserves at Christmas were a highlight for me when I was a kid. Strawberries in winter always remind me of her.”