Carol Shields - Unless

A woman named Crystal McGinn once lived next door with her very large family, four children at least, teenagers, boisterous youngsters. Once Crystal invited Lois over for a cup of coffee and she had asked where Lois had gone to university. Not if she’d gone to university, but where. Mrs. McGinn had gone to Queen’s and studied economics. Lois did not tell Mrs.

McGinn that she herself had attended secretarial college for six months in Toronto, and then married her husband, a young doctor, and moved to Orangetown. She felt strongly that Crystal McGinn had overstepped with her question about which university. They hadn’t seen much of each other after that, nothing more than an occasional wave. She regrets this now.

She realizes that Mrs. McGinn’s question was not cruelly intended, only a little tactless.

Especially considering that Lois was the doctor’s wife. There was a certain prestige in that role, at least in the early days. It became her habit to remind herself of that fact, standing in front of the hall mirror, sucking in her stomach and saying musically: I am the wife of a physician.

She won a prize at the Orangetown Fair once for her German honey cake. When she registered for the competition she was advised to call it Swiss honey cake. She complied. But what did it matter? — she won anyway. She was given a blue ribbon, which her husband accidentally threw away when he was cleaning out the attic, years later. He felt terrible about that.

She loves Oprah. She arranges her day around Oprah. She has found a new self-courage recently, as a result of watching Oprah.

Her granddaughter Norah, her favourite — an endearing sweetness at the girl’s core — has been going through a hard time. She herself understands about times of difficulty. When she was in her early fifties she stopped baking and went to bed for two weeks. Her husband wanted to take her to the Mayo Clinic; that was all he talked about, the Mayo Clinic. Then she got up one day and cleaned the bathroom as it had never before been cleaned. That plunge into hygiene seemed to set things right. She was better able to cope after that.

Except lately. She can’t talk anymore. She doesn’t trust herself. Toads will come out of her open mouth. She’ll hurt people’s feelings. She has an opinion about what happened to Norah, and she doesn’t want anyone else to know. They’d think she was crazy. Women were supposed to be strong, but they weren’t really, they weren’t allowed to be. They were hopelessly encumbered with fibres and membranes and pads of malleable tissue; women were easily injured; critical injuries, that’s what came to you if you opened your mouth.

On the other hand, she knew Norah would be all right in the end. It was a matter of time, though the pneumonia was worrying. She did wish Reta would telephone. She was so glad, though, to have good company on a winter’s night. Bread pudding with lemon sauce. A cup of tea. She had been bending his ear off. This was so unlike her. She didn’t know how she got started.

On the whole she believed things worked out for the best. Didn’t Mr. Springer agree?

Already

“They’re burns,” Tom said, gesturing toward Norah’s hands and wrists. Norah was asleep, with an oxygen tube connected to her nose, Snow White in her glass case, and the girls and I are gathered around the bed like curious dwarves. The skin of her face was white and puffy.

Someone had brushed out her hair so that it fell cleanly on the pillowcase and on the shoulders of her blue hospital gown, tied in a bow at the back of her neck. My darling Norah.

To be sitting on a moulded plastic chair so close to her like this was heaven, never mind that her lungs were still partly filled with fluid.

She has been sleeping ever since we arrived. The pneumonia was still present but under control — that was a huge relief — but I was alarmed by her reddened, scarred hands lying exposed on the white cotton blanket. I felt like a voyeur, a transgressor in this room, and that any minute my daughter would open her eyes and accuse me. Of what, though?

“A combination of severe second-degree burns,” Tom continued in a voice I distantly recognized, its ups and downs carefully modulated — and his tone carrying me back to a walk we had once taken in the woods behind our house, the shrubs in full summer leaf, the crumbling earth giving way underfoot, when he told me that my mother’s cancer had advanced, that it had metastasized to her lungs, and the remaining time would be short, just a week or so.

“You can see she has experienced infection on the backs of both hands,” he said calmly.

“There’s a fair amount of scarring, and some of it might have been avoided if she’d been properly cared for.”

When did the burns occur? Why hadn’t we seen the condition of her hands before? Some of these questions came from Dr. DeVita, who was attending her, and some from Frances Quinn from the Promise Hostel, who had recognized late yesterday evening that Norah had been coughing for several days and probably needed to be looked at. Both Tom and I remembered glimpsing what we thought had been a rash or else chilblains.

“She always had gloves on,” Natalie reminded us. “Even last summer when it was boiling hot, in the middle of July even, she wore these old floppy gardening gloves.”

“Yes,” Chris said. “We thought it was weird.”

“That’s right,” I said. The garden gloves — she was wearing them the first day we found her last April at Bathurst and Bloor. The eleventh of April, a Tuesday, a day I would never forget. I had supposed she wore them to protect her hands from the rough pavement. What silent pain she must have suffered.

She slept in those gloves, Frances Quinn had told Tom earlier in the day. Every night at the hostel. The staff thought it was odd, but then so many of the hostel clients exhibited eccentricities.

What about when she ate in the dining hall?

She took off her gloves when she ate.

And what was the state of her hands?

Red. What looked like a rash. Well, it’s really the destruction of body tissue, a step in the healing process. Someone, one of the volunteers, remembers her hands were bandaged when she first arrived, the first couple of weeks.

And when exactly would that have been?

It’s all in her file. She came to Promise for the first time on the twelfth of April — but Tom and I already knew that. Ordinarily people were allowed to stay for just three months, that’s the rule, but Norah was so quiet, so accommodating. It just got overlooked, her long stay. No one raised an objection.

“I would say those burns are at least six months old,” said Dr. DeVita, from the burn unit.

Six months. That would take us back to early summer. Or even spring.

“I wonder if Ben Abbot knows anything about a fire,” I said. I had difficulty invoking the name of Norah’s old boyfriend. It stuck in my throat. It was easier not to think of him.

“I’ve already phoned him,” Tom said. “Early this afternoon. He doesn’t have the least idea how she might have burnt herself. He was very sure of that. I had to believe him.”

“Is she still in pain? Her hands, I mean.”

“Probably not. But these burns haven’t been looked after. You can see where the granulation has taken hold.”

It was close to midnight. The room felt full of hard surfaces, shadows arching up into the corners of the ceiling, just one tiny light burning over Norah’s bed, and in another bed, behind a cloth screen, a stranger tossing and moaning between her sheets, having nightmares, muttering in some language I couldn’t identify.

It occurred to me, then, to phone my mother-in-law and tell her we would not be home tonight. Norah was doing well, but we would be staying in the hospital. A family room had been found for us at the end of the corridor, and the girls were about to go to sleep.