“Three hours? Then it is certainly too late. Tomorrow, perhaps.”
“Dammit! I want to talk to her before I call my—our—mother. Shit.” He grabbed a bag of chewy chocolate chip cookies from the bottom shelf of the fridge and took them back to the couch.
“What if you sent her a text and asked her to go to your mother’s home tomorrow evening in order to speak with them both at the same time? I believe that your news will be best heard if they can share it.” She turned back to the computer.
“Like it was with Isis? Yeah, that went so well that I want to do it all over again.”
Not certain how to handle Jerry’s sudden anger, she let him munch his cookies, while she searched for Ravi Shankar. With a few clicks she found what she was looking for and Shankar’s distinct “Mishra Gara” filled the near silence of the loft. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the peaceful sitar music. “I have heard this before. A visiting British diplomat had an Indian musician with him, I believe. Or maybe it was one of my mother’s cousins. My memory of the event is foggy, at best. A beautiful sound, nonetheless. Uncle Palak was so right. Do you not think so?” She turned back to Jerry but he wasn’t listening, he was finishing a text.
“There. Sent. Tomorrow at five, our time. Remind me.” He pushed the heel of his hand against his temple. “Please, Ana.”
“Of course.” She took the cookies from him and kissed his forehead. She was worried. “If you are still hungry, then might I suggest something healthier than baked goods? Some fruit salad, perhaps?”
Jerry grumbled. “Fine, but make it quick, please. I’m hungry now.” He jammed his hands into his temples, but after a moment he relaxed, as if the pain suddenly vanished. “Oh, thank God.” He swung his feet around and up onto the couch. Before Ana could even ask him if he wanted fruit juice or green tea, he was snoring.
JERRY WOKE UP frustrated. “Let’s go for a walk. I’m feeling cooped up in this one room prison.” There was no answer. He was alone, which suited him fine. He grabbed his keys and coat and started for the door. At the last second he had a minor crisis of conscience, scribbled a note that he was walking down to the Inner Harbour, and left it on the coffee table next to the book.
HE STILL DIDN’T know a lot of the landmarks in downtown Victoria, but he knew how to get from the loft to the Inner Harbour and did so without much awareness of the world around him. He stopped at traffic lights, walked around fellow pedestrians, avoided the larger of the puddles, and eventually found himself sitting on a bench with his back to the Empress Hotel, staring at the private sailboats and cruisers strung with bright, twinkling Christmas lights, from “stem to stern” as his sailor father used to say.
A few people were out strolling the boardwalk, but they kept to themselves and he was okay with that. The visual slow bobbing of the craft in their moorings and the subtle sloshing of the harbour waters lulled him into a state of separateness. He knew he wasn’t asleep, but he was also not really aware of the individual details of the world around him. He heard only the water, saw only the swaying of the strings of lights.
How long he sat like that, Jerry had no idea. It had been dark when he claimed his space on the bench, and it was still dark when Ana finally sat down beside him and placed her slender hand on his own. He stirred slowly up from wherever he had been drifting and discovered that he was cold and damp with fresh rain. Lost within the waves and lights, he hadn’t noticed either the temperature or the wet.
“Jerry, you need to get up, get moving. I will wave down a cab for us.”
“No cab. The walk will do me good, warm me up, I guess.”
“But you are wet and shivering. You will catch—”
“What? My death from a cold?” He was shivering, too; and somewhere along the line his fingers had acquired a pale blue tint. “It’s not far. We’ll be home soon and I’ll go straight to bed.”
“First you will take a warm bath, then to bed.”
She was right. Even his currently primitive mind could see that. He let her lead him up from the boardwalk to street level, away from the anesthetizing bobbing lights and sloshing harbour. With the fingers of his left hand tightly laced with those of her right, she guided him along the drizzle-dampened streets, and eventually up to the loft. At some point he sensed her undressing him, but she left him alone to remove his boxers and climb into the tub.
Jerry drifted off again, but it couldn’t have been for long because when he awoke, the water in the tub was still hot, a hint of steam drifting up. At some point Ana had taken his damp clothes away and left his folded pyjamas, fluffy robe, and a clean baseball cap on top of the toilet seat cover. He twisted the kinks out of his neck and felt pretty good—much better than he had when Ana found him on the bench. Slowly, he dipped the washcloth in the hot water and washed away the last of the rain dampness. After a vigorous finger-tip-scrubbing of most of his scalp, careful to avoid the small bandage on his head, he rose up from the steam and climbed carefully from the tub. Even the process of drying himself off with the big towel seemed to give him a boost. By the time he was dressed in his goofy fleece pyjamas and cocooned in the robe, he was ready to face the world.
A subtle, sweet scent greeted Jerry when he stepped out of the bathroom. “Chocolate?”
“Hot cocoa.” Ana rose from the couch, a mug in her hand and a worried half-smile on her face.
“Perfection. Just what Dr. Romanova ordered.” He accepted the mug from her and kissed her gently on the lips. “You are a life saver. Thank you.”
“And you are my heart and soul.”
“So, what’s the plan?”
“Drink your cocoa and then bed.”
“Doctor’s orders?”
“Shvibzik’s command, which is much more serious.”
A gentle wave of vertigo bumped into Jerry and he stumbled a half step on the way to the couch. “Change of plans. I’d better take the cocoa straight to bed.” He stumbled in that direction.
“Jerry?” She took his elbow.
“I’ll be okay, once I lie down.”
They reached the bed; he placed the mug on the bedside table, and fell face-first on top of the comforter. Ana was about to call 9-1-1 for help, afraid that he had collapsed, when his snoring cancelled the alarm. She hoisted him up and the rest of the way onto the bed, struggled to maneuver the covers from under him to over him, and once again, climbed in with him, wishing she could pray him to good health.
HALEY HAD ONCE asked Jerry, back when they lived together in the small apartment in St. Marys, what would be his favourite way to wake up, other than with sex. Jerry’s unhesitating answer was “bacon”. His favourite way to wake up was to the smell of perfectly cooked bacon. When he was a child it was to the smell of toast being made but when someone told him that smelling phantom toast was a sign of having a stroke, he adapted quickly and decided that cooking bacon meant the same thing—that breakfast would be ready soon, and someone else was making it.
On Tuesday morning, when Jerry finally found his way up from a foggy, dream-filled sleep of which he remembered no details whatsoever, it was because a slender tentacle of airborne bacon drew him up and into the word of reality. He heard Ana puttering in the kitchen and Ravi Shankar’s sitar in the background. “That smells great, Shvibzik!” At least, that’s what he tried to call out. Instead, what came out was a soft, slurred moan. Then his face started twitching and both his hands curled into tight fists. His toes clenched, his back arched, and suddenly all he could see was the fluttering of his eyelids.