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  At the end of the afternoon, George Jr. and Marci take Edith back to the home, and all the other relatives gather up their stuff and head out the door. I hold open a pink, fibre-filled bag with a hood and Donna stuffs the spitball into it and then snaps and zips and ties the whole thing into a tidy, immobile package. It seems to solve the windmill problem, in addition to keeping Spitball from freezing on the way home.

  “See you when I get out,” I tell it. It’s drifting off to sleep, but a fatuous smile drifts across its features. It’s probably figured out that if it’s going to see me again, there is a large probability that there are more date squares to be had.

  While Spitball and I were off watching unsuitable and violent cartoons (Sleeping Beauty—we cheered for the witch/ dragon) the relatives hashed and chewed and argued. Marci phoned Fiona and offered her the job while Ranald was still enumerating the reasons why it wasn’t such a good idea to hire her, or even to take Edith out of the home with its round-the-clock professional care in the first place. Fiona accepted the job almost before the words were out of Marci’s mouth. Everybody then had the fun of ganging up on Ranald and forcing him to agree that since Edith has given up physical violence she is no longer a huge problem to look after, and that we’ve got to get her out of the home before she fades away to nothing. Spitball’s daddy is quite a decent carpenter, everybody agrees on that, and as there is no rush to make the deadline for the summer issue of House Beautiful, Bennie, Donna and Spitball are to be my new tenants. Donna had a quick little run over to see where her washer and dryer could be hooked up and which room could be a nursery for Spitball. She’s almost as keen to get Spitball out of her and Bennie’s bedroom as she is to dump the mother-in-law. I keep forgetting she’s only five years older than me, with fully intact hormones and a license to use them. The rent money will pay the taxes and keep me in books, beer, and bras. The blood money will be used to buy building supplies and to pay Fiona to come in from seven to noon in the morning and four to six in the afternoon to bathe and feed and medicate and change and do all that stuff for Edith. Elizabeth will mind her in the afternoons and evenings during the week and I will help when I’m not in school. Donna, who trained to be a nursing assistant before Spitball disrupted her life, will come in to run the show on Saturdays and Sundays. The money I pay her will probably just come back to me as rent money, but somehow it doesn’t seem quite as bloody once it’s been rinsed around the family a bit. Elizabeth and I will babysit Spitball from time to time. How on earth do people without relatives ever get anything done?

  Fiona told us we’re going to have to know how to do everything for Edith, and that includes giving her a bath and changing her, which stopped me in my tracks, I’ll tell you. Elizabeth says she’ll take care of all that. Elizabeth’s getting old though, she’ll need me to give her a hand, at least with lifting and what not. I can’t see myself ever putting a diaper on my grandmother, and I have a pretty good imagination. I should practice on Spitball when I get home for good, though, just so I know how to do it if there’s ever a real emergency.

  The important thing is, Edith’s coming home and I don’t have to think about money and houses. When I get out, I have a home to go to. Spanner sleeps with me all the time now. I have to help him hoist his coggly back legs up on the bed, they just don’t have enough jump in them these days. He’s not supposed to sleep on the bed, but I don’t tell on him. I never have cold feet when he’s around, he’s like a hairy space heater. He snores so loud, it’s unbelievable, he’s worse than adenoidal Evvie. It’s like sleeping with a jackhammer. He’s the grandest dog.

  CHAPTER 58

  Elizabeth and I are knitting and stitching and drinking tea. Spitball is visiting while her mama and her aunts clean out and scrub Edith’s house. Donna is not wasting any time moving in; it’s less than a day since we settled the details. Spitball waves a piece of purple cloth in the air and sucks on a pacifier engineered to resemble Donna’s left nipple. We are not to put pins anywhere near her because she will eat them, so her mother says. I think Spitball’s got more sense than that, but I could be wrong.

  I am learning to make a sweater for Spitball. My ambition knows no bounds. It’s purple, and there are buttons with chickens painted on them to go down the front. I had toyed with the idea of incorporating a whole flock of chickens into the sweater design until Elizabeth explained how much work this would be.

  “But I want chickens,” I said, and she hauled out the button bag. Elizabeth used to have real chickens, and when I came to visit she would send me out to get eggs. The birds were cranky, bad-tempered, and they pecked at me. One-woman chickens, they loved Elizabeth; they all but laid eggs right into her hand. Here’s the thing about chickens: in the early 1940s a New Jersey farmer brought his sick biddies into a microbiology lab at Rutgers University. The chickens had a recurring infection which, it turned out, they were getting from the dirt in their backyard. There was a fungus in the dirt which not only made the chickens sick, it also produced a bacteria-killing substance to protect itself. This was streptomycin, one of the most important drugs used to treat tuberculosis. When I first went into the San, they gave me injections of strep every day for two months. They still give them to me twice a week, and will until I’m finally out of there. My bum is one big mass of bruises and may be permanently ruined; it’s covered in stab marks surrounded by various colours. Having aching, technicolour cheeks beats being dead, though.

  “Here’s to chickens,” I say, lifting my teacup.

  “They’re the stupidest birds,” sighs Elizabeth.

  “I thought you loved chickens.”

  “I do. It’s not their fault they don’t have much in the way of brains. We’re all God’s creatures.”

  Spitball farts her agreement.

  Don’t expect the chickens to come to your rescue the next time around. I’m serious. The tuberculosis bacillus belongs to a very large family of bacteria (as far as we know only one other member of that family causes disease in humans, and that disease is leprosy). Some strains of tuberculosis are dangerous and some are perfectly harmless—much like your relatives. Tuberculosis is everywhere and most of the time your body laughs it off. Again, think of your relatives.

  The death rate for tuberculosis began to drop sharply in the nineteenth century. If you get it today you have to take drugs for a long time, but you aren’t going to languish on a settee and expire gracefully, blood-stained lace handkerchief clutched in one transparent hand. You aren’t going to hack out your lungs in a poetic, but filthy, slum (unless, of course, you are poor, crowded, hungry, and living in one of the many countries without affordable universal medical care.)

  The decline in the death rate began despite weirdly named cures in murky brown bottles, pseudo-asses’ milk made out of puréed slugs, hefty lungfuls of Air du Barn, and well before the rise of sanatoriums and drug therapy. Here’s the big scary thing: the disease was already on the way out when we discovered and began using modern therapies. The population had built up natural immunity and the bacteria had evolved into a less lethal form.

  We have absolutely no guarantee it won’t mutate again, into something we haven’t evolved to fight and for which we have no drugs. There is no guarantee chickens will come riding to the rescue, again. We leave huge pools of tuberculosis to fester and mutate in other places around the planet. Why? Because we’re cheap. Because we’re selfish. Because the festering takes place where we don’t have to see it. But it’s a small planet, and we all breathe the same air whether we live in a slum in Calcutta, a farm in Cape Breton, or Buckingham Palace.

  PART SIX

  CHAPTER 59

  We have all been drafted, appointed, committee’d. The business of the Royal Alexandra and all its occupants—patients and staff and even innocent unknowing visitors who stray within her ambit—is to get Elaine properly married to Bernard.

  Who in their right mind would choose to get married in a tuberculosis hospital? Well, if you’ve lived here (a year an
d a half for Bernard, fifteen months for Elaine), done your courting here, and made friends among the staff and the patients—why not? If it’s been your home and all the people who understand you and know what you’ve been through are here, why shouldn’t you? There’s a chapel, there’s a visiting minister, there’s a kitchen, there’s a crowd of guests, there’s Rehab and its piles of unclaimed, pastel crêpe paper just waiting to be plundered.

  Elaine sweeps around the halls, checking up on her various battalions to make sure we are all beavering away as we should. She was technically discharged as of yesterday, but she’s not leaving until tomorrow afternoon, when she can leave as Mrs. Bernard Schwartz. Bernard was discharged mid-January.

  “Twenty bucks says we never see him again,” says Denise.

  “Denise! What an awful thing to say.” Evvie is appalled that Denise could think such a thing.

  “I say he panics, hits the highway, and keeps running.” Denise is just bored, and looking to stir up something.

  “You’re on,” I say. “Evvie holds the money.”

  Bernard has been back to visit Elaine every night since he left and shows no signs of wanting to cut and run. I think my twenty bucks are safe.

  We are cutting out a million hearts from pink and rose and lavender crêpe paper and sticking them in frilled bunches on lace paper doilies and gluing streamers to them, then thumbtacking the whole mess up all over the walls of the dining room, where the reception is to be held. The chapel is being decorated by a team of florists with real flowers. We are not allowed to help them, or even to watch. Evvie is dying to see the flowers—the lush, damp smell of them wafts down the hallway towards us—and we have promised to sneak her in tonight while Elaine is seeing Bernard off at the end of visiting hours. Elaine has got the key from the chaplain and plans to keep the chapel locked up until just before the ceremony, but Denise knows how to pick the lock. We had our final rehearsal this morning, before the flowers came, but Evvie says it’s not the same and she’ll get all distracted by the beautiful flowers tomorrow and likely trip and fall on her high, high heels and she’ll be mortified and just die and then Elaine will kill her.

  When Elaine finally realized that Evvie is two inches shorter than we said she was, she bought her a pair of five-inch heels to wear to bring her up to an acceptable level. Evvie, whose usual footwear is slippers at the Alex and gumboots at home, practices walking in them every spare minute. So, to avoid broken ankles and bloodshed on the happy day, we’re going to sneak in and desensitize Evvie tonight. We’ll march her up and down past those hot-house bouquets until she can mince along without getting weak in the knees, wanting to bury her head in the dizzy smell of roses and carnations, and falling off her shoes.

  “If you have one blue eye and one green eye, can you see two colours at once?” asks Evvie. Elaine’s elderly male cousin has driven up from Yarmouth to give her away and we met him at the rehearsal. He has different coloured eyes and Evvie is still not over it.

  “How many colours do you normally see?” Denise snorts. “Don’t tell me you only see them one colour at a time.”

  It’s a good question, I think. If he looks at the ocean, for example, can he see two oceans, a blue one laid over a green one, and the whole thing not mushed into aquamarine? And what colour of eye do you need to see the wind? What is the colour we cannot see? That’s one I’ve been asking since I was a kid and nobody takes me seriously.

  “There’s a fourth primary colour,” I tell Evvie, “and three more secondary colours it makes when it mixes with blue and yellow and red. And all the variations. Colour X mixed with red produces X-red, which we see only as red because our brains and eyes and central nervous systems and minds do not register X. Then there is X-blue and X-yellow, which look like blue or yellow to us. If you mix all the known colours together using paint you get black, but if you mix them together using coloured light you get white. I know because I saw it at a science museum once.”

  “You’re lying,” says Denise. “Don’t believe her fairy tales, Evvie.”

  “Not only that,” I tell her, ignoring Denise, “but if you mix black with X you get the colour of the shadow cast on the inside of a black hole, you get the colour of evil, and endless death, and if you mix white light with X-coloured light, you get invisibility. Everything wonderful we cannot see is X plus white light. Heaven, for example, is X plus white light. So is tomorrow, and thought, and potential, and generosity, and the smell of roses.”

  “No, Gwen,” Evvie shakes her head. “Roses smells deep dark pink, like the sunrise, early on your birthday morning in summer.”

  I am floored. She is right.

  “You’re right,” I say.

  “You’re both nuts,” says Denise.

  CHAPTER 60

  Evvie’s losing it. We’ve had to get Mrs. Driscoll in here to steady her. Mrs. Driscoll is regal in royal blue, and how she got out of wearing a cartwheel on her head I don’t know, but her hat is a smaller, more subdued version of ours, in the same watered silk as her dress, with the merest wisp of chiffon veiling. She is the essence of serenity; five minutes with her and Evvie’s voice drops a half-octave and she stops hyperventilating.

  “All eyes will be on the bride,” Mrs. Driscoll reminds her, kindly. “You look lovely, Evvie, but everyone will be staring at Elaine. The bride is always the focus of everyone’s attention.”

  Thank God, I think, and Mrs. Driscoll goes back down the hall to spread balm over Elaine, whose nerves of steel are finally beginning to show faint signs of metal fatigue.

  Evvie has slowed down to a quiet whimper, but she’s still afraid she’ll fall off her shoes, trip on her dress, drop her flowers, and ruin the wedding. Denise forces a big slug of jam-jar juice down her protesting throat and Evvie starts to relax. I drag her down to the main bathroom, where one of two full-length mirrors is screwed to the back of the door (the other’s been wrenched off its mooring and is leaning against the wall in Elaine’s room). We put Evvie’s hat on her head and stand her in front of the mirror.

  She smiles and she’s incandescent. Propped up on her heels, surrounded by yards of billowing lavender chiffon, with a little lipstick and blush on her face, a few pearls strung around her throat and clipped to her ears—she looks like a candy angel. The hairdresser has already been in and seen to us lower orders; he’s smoothed and braided Denise and Evvie’s hair into elegant chignons, low on the backs of their necks. The cartwheels sit nicely on top, the brims dipping gently in the breeze when they walk. Evvie’s hair, after weeks of Denise’s devoted attention, is silky, spun gold.

  “Nelson will shit himself,” says Denise.

  Evvie blushes, hairline to heels. She’s getting out on a weekend pass right after the reception, and Nelson is a guest at the wedding. He’s probably out there right now, shifting uneasily in shirt and tie and sports jacket, wondering how long it will be before he can grab Evvie and run.

  “You pack those birth control pills of yours?”

  “Course I did, you wicked thing!” Evvie starts to giggle and shoves Denise. Denise grabs for me, I grab onto Evvie, and we go down in a pile of lavender smoke.

  “My dress! My dress! Don’t tear my dress!” screams Evvie. Denise and I howl until we almost pee our pants. Other than bent hat rims there is no great amount of damage, and once we disentangle ourselves the hats are easily straightened out and reattached. Nobody’s hair has budged, thanks to a zillion clips and enough hairspray to hold a grizzly bear’s hide in frozen waves. The hairdresser’s solution to my chopped-off mess was to yank it all back, glue it down, and then attach a false chignon to cover the stubble. I think he’s stapled it through to the bone, because the hairpiece is not moving and quite a bit of metal seems to be spiked through to my brain. If there’s a lightning storm before this is over, I’m toast.

  Finally, we are assembled outside the chapel, sniffing at our flowers and fluffing up our skirts. The doors are closed so no one can peek out and see us until Elaine is good and ready.
She sweeps into view and we get our first look at The Bride. She has tricked us out like party favours, but she has chosen elegance for herself, much to my surprise. I was expecting the worst: a kazillion petticoats and puffy monster sleeves and a dropped heart-shaped neckline displaying an acre or two of bony, freckled cleavage. But no—she’s not pretending to be twenty-two, she’s admitting to at least thirty-nine of her forty-seven years; she’s wearing a two-piece outfit in heavy cream silk, a full-length gown with a simple A-line and a small train at the back; a bolero sort of long-sleeved jacket with a surprisingly delicate amount of lace and pearl trim. No veil. She’s let loose with her hat, though, but she’s six foot tall and thin as a rake, so she can manage a considerable amount of vegetation and debris on her head. This one’s as big as our cartwheels and loaded with pearls, lace, white and pink roses, blue forget-me-nots, and streamers of pink and lavender satin ribbon trailing like a waterfall down her back. Her bouquet is another version of her hat. I swear, you could attach a string to that hat and fly it out the window. You could get great altitude with that hat.

  She atomizes about a gallon of perfume in the hall around herself and us, and once we’ve stopped coughing she straightens Evvie’s shoulders, twitches the ribbons on my bouquet, spit-cleans an imaginary smudge on Denise’s chin—we almost lose Denise here, I have to poke her good and hard so she doesn’t slug the bride—and lines us up. She doesn’t touch Mrs. Driscoll. Then she arranges her own ribbons, cues the music, nods to Patrick to open the door, and we’re off and mincing.

  People are crying. Snivelling and weeping. Personally, I don’t think we look that bad.