“Mon D’jeu, qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?” cries Mimi.
Crack cocaine, a human skull — a pound of butter. This house has become a cholesterol-free zone, but Jack has obviously been hiding a stash. He plunks the butter on the table in front of Madeleine with a wheezy chuckle—“For you. Some skin on your bones”—grins himself mauve and returns to the living room.
Mimi shakes her head and says, “You have the nicest papa in the world.”
The kitchen is immaculate. The one patch of chaos flourishes around the phone: stacks of rubber-banded envelopes, a jumble of pens — most of which, her father claims, are out of ink — the old dented pop-up tin address book, whose entries he swears would flummox a Bletchley Park code-breaker, and a Maxwell House Coffee tin jammed with mysterious essentials impossible to inventory. It strikes Madeleine for the first time that her mother’s filing system — her way of working — is not dissimilar to her own. In this kitchen, you don’t dare throw anything away unless your name is Mimi.
Her mother is loading the dishwasher, effortlessly executing a spatial feat the equivalent of cramming twenty-five people into a VW bug. She pauses and holds up a mug stamped with some sort of impressionistic painting. “A lesbian gave me this mug.”
Madeleine looks up, at a loss. “… That’s nice.” Is this the breakthrough? Are we going to have the Movie of the Week reconciliation now?
But Mimi asks, “What are you doing this summer?”
“Working probably.”
“Why don’t you come with your father and me to Bouctouche? Your cousins would love to see you.”
“Maybe I will.” Sure, I’m thirty-two years old, why wouldn’t I take a holiday alone with my parents? By the way, Maman, I’m divorced and in love.
The Pope, Queen Elizabeth II, Charles and Diana and The Blessed Virgin Mary look down from a row of commemorative plates on a plate-rail that runs the upper perimeter of the kitchen, their ranks bolstered by the Acadian flag, the Eiffel Tower, the crest of 4 Fighter Wing and a New Brunswick lighthouse. The cuckoo clock is mounted over the stove as usual, the same faint apprehension hovering about its closed door.
Past the kitchen — at the far end of the living room, by the patio doors with their sheers — Madeleine can see that the television is on and muted—Murder, She Wrote, a rerun. On the coffee table the crystal roosters still duke it out and, above the door to the master bedroom, Dürer’s praying hands preside. The stereo is playing a cassette of east-coast fiddle music, Grandmaman’s hooked rug with the cooked lobsters in the waves hangs over the couch, and in pride of place above the mantel of the gas fireplace is the oil painting of the Alps. Plus ça change.
Madeleine tries and fails to wedge her plate into the dishwasher, so rinses it in the sink and joins her father in the living room. He sits half reclined in his gold La-Z-Boy, newspaper fanned out in front of him, several more washed up around his chair. She sinks into the couch to his right and is tempted to turn up the TV, stretch out and veg. Why did she come here again? Wasn’t it so she could rest? Regress? Hey Dad, want to play Chinese checkers? She pulls her eyes from the screen to the side table, about to reach for the remote when she sees it. Tucked under the table, an oxygen tank. Industrial green with a transparent plastic coil and mask, it hits her like an obscenity.
She finds her voice and asks casually, “When’d you get this groovy accessory?”
“What? Oh that, little while ago. Keeps me fit for my jog around the block.”
She wills her smile to hang in place, like a picture too heavy for its nail. “That’s good, so it helps, eh?”
He shrugs. “It’s more for show. I take a little nip now and then to please Her Nibs.” He grins and gestures with his thumb toward the basement stairs, where Mimi has gone to look for something.
Madeleine smiles back. She doesn’t question the charade.
Why didn’t her mother tell her that Dad is on oxygen now? That changes things. When you see the oxygen van pull up in front of a house, you know someone in there has had it. Don’t think that. She swallows. “Just as well to have it on hand, eh?”
“Oh yeah,” he says, picking up the paper.
“Dad?”
He drops the paper, looks up suddenly and says, “Wait now”—clears his throat of reediness. “I just remembered.” And gets up.
She can tell he is moving spryly on purpose, for show. For her. What’s worse is that she wants him to. She doesn’t want to see him shuffle the way he did in the hospital, with his bracelet and gaping blue gown. Hospitals are where people go to shuffle, and when they no longer need to shuffle they go home. She doesn’t want to see him shuffle here. It would mean he was sent home shuffling. Sent home to die. Don’t.
She watches him disappear into the bedroom with the deliberate spring in his slippers. On the TV, Angela Lansbury talks to a nervous man with sideburns and confronts him with a titanium letter opener. Jack emerges from his bedroom and tosses her something. She catches it.
A silver cross suspended from a red-and-white-striped ribbon. The Air Force Cross.
“That’s for you,” he says.
She looks up. “Wow.”
He says, almost sighs, “Thought you’d like that,” returns casually to the La-Z-Boy and reaches for his newspaper.
This is all the conversation he will muster for another few moments. That’s what the newspaper is for now. It helps to smooth over the patches when he no longer has breath for speech.
“Thanks, Dad.” She closes her hand around the medal until she feels its four points dig into her palm — this is the way not to cry when your father gives you something he wants you to have after he dies.
When she can open her hand again, she looks down at it. Silver thunderbolts and wings, a cross composed of propeller blades topped by an imperial crown. For valour courage and devotion to duty whilst flying, though not in active operations against the enemy.
“You got this in Centralia in, what? Forty-two?”
“Forty-three.” He’s reaching over the side of his chair, fishing in his newspaper pile.
“Can I help you find something?”
He shakes his head, going pink, his old irritation. “Maman puts my papers into the recycling before I’ve read half of them.”
“Which one are you looking for?”
“Couple months ago.” He reaches toward the table for his glasses, and finds them on his nose.
She rifles through and finds a yellowed two-year-old copy of The Washington Post.
“That’s it.” He looks at it accusingly. “She must’ve hid it on me,” he says in his playful tone, leafing through it.
Madeleine says, “I was thinking of going back there. To Centralia.”
“How come?” he asks, and clears his throat.
“I want to see if there are any bones in that stormpipe,” she answers, blinking in surprise at her own words. He raises his eyebrows but continues skimming the Post. “Remember there was a dog trapped?”
He shakes his head, but she can see him taking a reading, getting a fix….
“The night of flying up.”
He locks on.
She takes a deep breath, but quietly, not wanting to worry him. She is already trembling, cold. “You told me the fire truck came and saved it.”