Watching You Without Me Read online

  Also by Lynn Coady

  Strange Heaven

  Play the Monster Blind

  Saints of Big Harbour

  Mean Boy

  The Antagonist

  Hellgoing

  Copyright © 2019 Lynn Coady

  Published in Canada in 2019 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  All of the events and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Watching you without me / Lynn Coady.

  Names: Coady, Lynn, 1970– author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190043792 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190043814 | ISBN 9781487006884 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487006891 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487006907 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8555.O23 W38 2019 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

  Book design: Alysia Shewchuk

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

  for the caregivers

  (What if people really did that — sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent? A box of chocolates with centers like the yolks of turkey’s eggs. A mud doll with hollow eye sockets. A heap of roses slightly more fragrant than rotten. A package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open.)

  — Alice Munro

  I Brought This Mess to Town

  1

  I was in my mother’s room when the screen door opened and a man started to yell. It was so unexpected and disorienting that for a second I didn’t even know where I was. Then I glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand, with its red, oversized display for aging eyes, and remembered I’d been in here, kneeling at her empty bedside, for over an hour. I was supposed to be boxing things up, but mostly I’d spent the time laying various items across the bed and randomly smelling them.

  Hullo there! How’s my girlfriend?

  That was what he’d shouted, and now I could hear Kelli from her perch in the living room, babbling something pleased in reply. There was no reason to be alarmed. It was someone Kelli knew, therefore some appointment I must have overlooked in the schedule. The schedule was kept inside a chewed-up-­looking file folder called Kelli’s World! (with a heart above the i), which my mother had maintained over the past few decades, and which I was only now beginning to successfully decode. In the numb and frantic days after my arrival, Kelli’s World! had been both blessing and curse. There’d been so much to do and so much to cancel — appointments I cancelled and then realized I needed, so had to call back and apologetically reschedule. Kelli had, for example, a back-to-back dentist and dermatologist appointment that inconveniently fell on what it was clear would be my mother’s final days — those appointments I cancelled, obviously. But I ended up rescheduling Kelli’s “friendship circle” at the community centre, as much of a pain as it was to drive her there and then back across the bridge to the hospital. It was just that I’d realized the friendship circle would allow me the opportunity to actually be alone with my mother for the first time in I didn’t know how many years. An opportunity I figured I’d better seize.

  After she passed, the schedule just kept right on rolling.

  There’d been the five-on-the dot arrival of the cheerful, silver-haired couple from Meals on Wheels — not just every week, as I assumed when I saw the notation in Kelli’s World!, but every night. In the days leading up to the funeral, the “Wheelies” (as the couple very much enjoyed referring to themselves) had saved my life with their standing order of two blandly fragrant trays — one for Kelli and one for Irene — the second of which, because it was put in front of me, it occurred to me that I should eat. But after the wake, Irene’s refrigerator had been bursting with casseroles and the leftovers of casseroles. We were good for food, and the relentless cheer of the Wheelies, as much as Kelli thrilled to their arrival every evening, was becoming something I had to gird myself against. So pretty soon I cancelled the Wheelies too. I figured I could handle the evening meals well enough until I figured out what I was going to do with Kelli.

  Big Bean! Howdoya do, whaddya say, whaddya know?

  The man sounded louder now, more inside than out. I stood up, feeling annoyed with myself because the voice had startled me so badly. You’d think I would be used to the constant intrusions by now — the flurry of hot and cold running caregivers my mother had put in place once she received her ultimate diagnosis. Kelli’s bathers, for example. My mother had used to bathe Kelli herself, but it must’ve become too much for her at some point, because now she had bathers turning up every other day, at all hours, sometimes rapping on the door first thing in the morning, calling to my sister through the screen, was she ready for a nice shampoo? To be fair, the first morning this occurred also happened to be the first day the sun had risen without our mother in the world, so there hadn’t been much sleep the night before. I should have been ready for it, the tap-tap-tap at the door, but Kelli’s World! had been reading like hieroglyphics to me around then and the banging noise had brought me lurching from the bathroom wild-eyed, as if about to face a firing squad, toothbrush poking from the corner of my mouth like a final cigarette.

  But once I understood these invasions had my mother’s stamp — had been scheduled and approved by Irene herself — it was hard to feel aggrieved.

  It was also hard to feel aggrieved at the sight of Kelli, always overjoyed at the arrival of her bathers, rocking and smiling, repeating their names so happily and incessantly you can bet I learned them pretty quick myself. So far there’d been Ruby. Gisele. Brenna.

  But now it was —

  TrebieTrebieTrebie. That’s Trebie. Kelli knows Trebie. Followed by a stream of giggles — her distinctive heh-heh-heh that properly belonged to a villain from a Scooby-Doo cartoon.

  ’Course you do! To know me is to love me!

  Kelli kept chattering away as I came down the hall, repeating the new name in the rapid-fire way she had when something got her excited. HiTrebieHiTrebieHiTrebie.

  My sister only has a few things she likes to say — her “catchphrases,” my father used to call them — so when they change, when you hear Kelli uttering something entirely new, it feels odd, like a cool hand landing on your shoulder out of nowhere. Like when you know a stranger’s in the house because the air has shifted with an influx of new pheromones, the dust eddies suddenly swirling around in entirely different formations.

  Of course, there was a stranger in the house. Besides me, I mean.

  He was my sister’s walker. Every Tuesday and Friday at ten in the morning, Trevor and Kelli took a poky, meandering turn around the neighbourhood together. He’d been on vacation, he explained, which was why we hadn’t seen Trevor before now. And which was why Gisele had been the one walking Kelli the previous week.

  Nothing in Kelli’s World! had told me to expect a man. The bathers were all women and the silver-haired Wheelies had operated according to a quaint boy/girl protocol: he stayed with the car while she knocked lightly, announced herself with a musical call of Din-din! and set a tray before my vibrating-with-happiness sister. Later, looking over Kelli’s World!, the only notation I could find on Trevor’s Tuesday and Friday mornings were the letters BL — Irene
’s abbreviation for Bestlife, the home care agency she used.

  He didn’t wear scrubs — none of the Bestlife people did — but if he hadn’t told me he was a worker, I probably would have assumed it. There was something about his stance in particular: I am professional, it assured me; sanctioned. He’d also figured out a way of dressing that spoke of an office issuing orders somewhere. I think it was in the colours he chose — light khaki pants, a creamy yellow T-shirt, sunny and bright to distract from his dual vocational gloom-clouds of illness and infirmity, pulled over muscles that had been sculpted just enough to let you know they were there. Gingerish hair buzzed down to bristles. Of course, the clipboard was the accessory that put the whole outfit over the top.

  He still had a grin on his face when I arrived at the top of the stairs, the playful grin he wore to banter with Kelli. But his mouth went slack and round at the sight of me and for a moment he looked irritated by his own confusion. I gave him an apologetic smile. It was clear no one had told him of our mother’s death.

  * * *

  I’d already put on tea, so I took it off the stove, fished some cookies from a tin, and invited him to sit with us upstairs. Kelli seemed delighted by this. It wasn’t just that cookies in the a.m. weren’t the norm, but the home care workers, who in her mind I suppose comprised her circle of intimates, were not usually encouraged to socialize beyond what duty required. Kelli grinned and whispered into her lap as Trevor lowered himself into a chair across from her. There was no getting around the fact that my sister had been in tremendous spirits ever since our mother’s death. Irene’s absence hadn’t yet taken hold in Kelli, as far as I could tell — all she understood for the moment was that she was surrounded by novelty. Her sister being home, for example. A swirl of relatives she hadn’t seen in years bringing her plates of food, the afternoon of the wake. And now a tea party with her good friend Trebie.

  “I’m just sorry as all shit,” Trevor repeated one or two times, after I’d told him. He sat in a low chair with his toned, freckled arms dangling between his legs.

  “Yes,” I said. “It was a — well, it wasn’t actually a shock, I guess.”

  I was lying. It was a shock, but it wouldn’t have made sense for me to say so. My mother had been preparing me for this eventuality, mentally at least, since her diagnosis and subsequent mastectomy some ten years ago. But it was still a shock.

  “She was such a nice lady,” said Trevor. I’d heard these six words so many times in almost as many days. It sounded like easy lip service, just a thing you say when an old woman dies, but I knew it wasn’t, because whenever it was spoken to me, it was spoken in tones of astonishment, even awe — that’s how Trevor was saying it now. My mother had achieved an ideal of decent, patient, competent yet soft-spoken nice-ladyhood I think very few people encounter anymore. Everyone always experienced my mother as a rare exotic, an antique, somewhere between a concertina and a California condor.

  When I didn’t reply, Trevor nodded his head, as if agreeing with himself. “One nice fuckin lady.”

  “Nice fuckin lady,” concurred Kelli, in parrot mode. She only did that with people she liked.

  It made me smile to imagine my mother and Trevor in conversation, because my mother was decorous above all else. When necessary, she’d be decorous on other people’s behalf — she’d certainly been on my behalf enough. So I could imagine her overlooking Trevor’s unselfconscious profanity just as she’d overlooked the indelicacies of countless others in her decorous lifetime. Yet my mother was nice in the tradition of many a Nova Scotian lady of her generation and upbringing — it could be a stiff, dogmatic niceness of the schoolmarm stripe, a niceness of propriety and parochialism outlined with a filigree border of intolerance. I may as well come out and say that my mother could be irredeemably racist in that same nice-lady way, but even so, manners came first and she set great store in “keeping one’s opinions to oneself.” Once when I was visiting, the Sri Lankan family that had moved in down the street invited her to a party for a newborn baby (“I suppose you wouldn’t call it a Christening,” she mused to me). And my mother, by god, she defrosted a shepherd’s pie, blotted her lipstick, and floated down the sidewalk on a cloud of benign tolerance. “They were so welcoming!” she enthused to me afterwards, dumping all the delicious-looking food they had sent her home with into the garbage.

  These memories got me sniffling.

  “Ah, shit,” said Trevor, observing this.

  “Karie don’t cry no more, don’t cry no more, Karie.” Which was what Kelli always said to me when I cried, because she was the older sister.

  “Oh, it’s Karie, is it?” said Trevor.

  “Sorry,” I said. We’d been speaking a half hour and I still hadn’t identified myself beyond “Kelli’s sister.” His identity had taken precedence. “It’s Karen.”

  Trevor placed his hands on his knees in a finishing-the-­conversation gesture. “Well, me and the Kelli-bean here should get our walk in and let you” — I could see him mentally reach for something sombre and respectful — “do your thing.” He pushed on his knees and stood with a weird physical precision as if it was some kind of training exercise he usually did in sets of fifteen at the gym.

  I was nodding and Kelli was already on her feet, at the closet and putting her windbreaker on upside down. I got up to help her, but Trevor beat me to it, peeling the yellow nylon sleeves from Kelli’s arms, over her protests.

  “Jacket on!” said Kelli.

  “We gotta get it on right, Beaner.”

  “Geddit on right,” conceded Kelli, standing still for him.

  I watched the stranger dress my sister, feeling incongruously at peace. It was a suspicious feeling, it had no place in this house, in this hinge-like moment of my and my sister’s existence. Thinking about it now, I realize I had spent the days after my mother’s funeral flailing around for some kind of cosmic reassurance when it came to the arrangements I was beginning to make for Kelli’s future — looking for signs from the universe that the total upheaval she was facing would go smoothly and she’d be more or less ok. And somehow the sight of Kelli keeping still for Trevor, smiling and humming as he zipped her jacket up to her chin, had given me that reassurance, however briefly. See? Someone else taking care of Kelli. That’s all it is. It won’t be as hard as you think.

  And I was so grateful in that moment. When I tell this story now and people ask what I was thinking, it’s this feeling of incongruous peace that I remember. It exists in my memory as the quick, satisfying sound of a zipper being hoisted. I never mention it, though — not because it seems so irrelevant compared to the details that come later, the juicy stuff that makes people cringe and cover their eyes. It’s just that this is the moment of which I’m most ashamed. Ziiiipppppp! My pathetic gratitude. The wide-open door of it.

  2

  For the first five minutes of their walk, I just hovered at the top of the stairs, wondering if I should’ve double-checked Trevor’s credentials before I let him whisk Kelli out the door. The responsible thing to do would have been to ask him to wait and then call Bestlife for a quick confirmation. As opposed to feeding the stranger fucking cookies then standing off to one side with a stupid smile on my face as he zipped up Kelli’s jacket. But, my mind babbled, surely Bestlife ran background checks and surely your average sexual predator would not prioritize the 250-pound mentally handicapped woman with a skin condition his employer has placed in his care — or would he? Then I scolded myself that this mode of thinking was unfair, even sexist. I had not remotely entertained such dark notions about any of the female strangers who’d been alone with my naked sister in the downstairs bathroom throughout the week. But then I thought — perhaps I should have.

  You don’t know what you’re doing, said the robotic recorded-operator voice that had been playing in my head on repeat since I arrived. Whenever I felt myself flailing, I’d sit down, try to focus my brain, but all I ever
got was the recorded operator. We’re sorry. Your call is important to us. But you don’t know what you’re doing.

  I spun around and went looking for my phone to call 911 — but it took me so long to find it (why I was searching under my mother’s bed and rifling through the basement cubby — why, for that matter, I didn’t just think to pick up the landline — I couldn’t tell you) that by the time I found it sitting in plain sight on the kitchen table I had convinced myself that I was being irrational. I sat on the top step leading down into the foyer, clutching my phone, monitoring the front door. This was about fifteen minutes into Kelli and Trevor’s walk.

  Then I tried to distract myself by thinking about other things, but the things I started thinking about were a huddle of memories that had also been auto-replaying in my head for days, all revolving around the fight I had with my mother before she had to go into the hospital for her mastectomy, when I was thirty-five and she was sixty-seven. She had pleaded with me to come home and look after Kelli while she was in recovery. And I did as she asked, of course I did, but I wasn’t exactly gracious in my acquiescence. The request had come at a bad time. My marriage was on the rocks — just entering the early stages of its slow, five-year implosion — and in a panicked and nonsensical attempt to distract myself from this inevitability, I was busy applying to law school. And I was angry at her, irrationally enough. That was my response to her diagnosis — I was mad at her for terrifying me by getting sick. But I told myself at the time it was for not being as troubled as I felt she should be by my failing marriage. Because my mother had never really taken my marriage seriously in the first place since we didn’t formalize it within, as she put it, “the sanctity of Catholic tradition.” It had been formalized within the sanctity of a Caribbean all-inclusive package. So, feeling betrayed by the world in general and her in particular, I had taken the opportunity to lecture my cancer-stricken mother. This was not the first time the idea of putting Kelli into care had been broached, but it was certainly the first time I, her adult daughter, had suggested it to her. It was, you have to understand, a cardinal sin within our family theology. Forbidden, like uttering the name of G_d. It was something doctors — foolish, soulless doctors — had suggested over the years as my mother aged. Also well-meaning but ultimately idiotic friends and relatives who, behind closed doors, my mother and the dutiful daughter I used to be had sadly laughed at and shaken our heads over. Imagine — day-to-day life without Kelli! Kelli’s cartoon cackle, Kelli’s placid physical presence. Kelli’s needs, Kelli’s routines. Kelli’s helplessness, Kelli’s bowel movements. Kelli’s eczema and recurrent ear infections. Kelli’s stubborn physical strength and increasingly unmanageable girth. Imagine not knowing the joy of what it was to care for Kelli, day in and day out, until the cancer, nibbling away at your edges for so many decades, finally crept its way into your centre. And after a while, as my mother continued to shake her head and laugh sadly over the unimaginability of such things, I — as you can imagine — started to imagine them.