The Sweetness in the Lime Read online

  “He had a sister?” I had to ask.

  “Aunt Abigail,” Sarah repeated. “They had some sort of falling out, and she refused to have anything to do with us. Mum told me about her.”

  “You’re sure she’s dead?”

  “I asked Dad when I was preparing his will after mum died, back before, you know,” she explained. I knew. So Sarah had prepared his will. “Dad told me she died back in the 1960s.”

  But Aunt Abigail wasn’t dead. She was, in fact, the only person, living or dead, to show up for our father’s visitation.

  “What happened to all your co-workers?” Sarah demanded an hour into our lonely vigil. “I can’t believe not one of them showed up.” Sarah had ordered tea and sandwiches in anticipation of a crowd. I had to remind her again I no longer had co-workers, and the co-workers I used to have were too busy looking for new jobs, or fomenting revolution, or becoming the editor of some new giveaway rag to take time out from reconstructing their formerly busy lives to browse the obituaries, especially those that appeared in the Herald.

  Did they also still hate the other paper—I could barely bring myself to think its name—as much as I did? Irrational as it was, especially now, it had pained me to phone in my father’s obituary to the Herald. That the bored woman at the other end of the line didn’t bother to connect the dots to the police report of the elderly man who’d frozen to death in Needham Park and pursue its story possibilities both disappointed and also relieved me. I instructed the woman to spell out each of the obituary’s proper names twice just to be sure she was no Wendy Wagner. But I’d been the one responsible for the error.

  When Sarah first saw the older woman, probably in her late seventies or early eighties and dressed for church, enter our too-large visiting cubicle, she jumped instantly into hostess mode, extending her hand. “I’m Arthur’s daughter, Sarah Cohen,” she said. “And this is my brother, Eli.” The woman, who was thin and appeared frail, took Sarah’s hand, but she didn’t introduce herself.

  “And you would be?” Sarah finally had to ask.

  “I’m your ‘late’ Aunt Abigail. I was so sorry to read that I’d died too.” She said it deadpan, then broke into a full-throated laugh that reminded me of a laugh my memory could almost place. My father? Had my father ever laughed like that? “When you get to my age,” she confided, “you don’t take living for granted.”

  Although I could discern family resemblance—the deeply dimpled chin I myself had inherited—Aunt Abigail seemed a creature from a different planet. Outgoing, charming, funny, witty. “Oh, you should have known your father back in the day,” she replied when Sarah made the too-obvious comparison between our dour father and this woman standing in front of us. “He was a different person before the war. Before his…what do they call that now? Post troubles syndrome?” Post-traumatic stress disorder? “I have to say I was surprised when I saw the reference to Arty’s medal in the paper,” she continued. “You know he tried to send it back?” We hadn’t. “From what I understood from your mother, bless her soul, it gave him nightmares.”

  As my aunt unfolded the story in fits and starts between sips of weak tea and bites from another of the too-many crust-less sandwiches Sarah had ordered, we discovered that our father’s “gallantry and devotion to duty under fire” had changed his life. He had, in fact, sent back the medal, declared himself not a hero but a murderer. A murderer! Jesus! His nightmares! “I killed them. I killed them all….” And I’d bragged in his obituary about a medal my father returned!

  “Your mother came to me after she found out what he’d done, and I helped her write a letter to the admiral. He managed to retrieve it and mailed it back to her for when Arty felt better again.” So that was why the envelope was addressed to my mother. Was the admiral’s letter buried in one of the drawers? “But Arty never really felt better again. And when he found out I’d helped your mother write the letter, he cut me off completely. Told me never to darken their door again. Even when things got a little better, after you were born—” she nodded toward Sarah— “Arty never changed his mind, never spoke to me again. Arty was stubborn that way. Always was. And now….” I could see her tears welling up, felt my own.

  ****

  “Are you OK?”

  “I am.”

  “About Dad, I mean? About what happened?”

  About which what happened? About the fact I’d let my father wander away to die in a snowdrift? About the fact my father was obsessed with the notion he’d killed all those other people? He hadn’t, of course. Not really. Not if I understood what Aunt Abigail told us. In fact, he’d saved the lives of his fellow crew members on board his destroyer that night. They would have all been killed if not for my father. The others? The young Germans on the sub? The ones who did die? Not my father’s fault. He was no murderer. But what would he say if he knew I’d celebrated what he considered his shame in the last words written about him? What would he say now if he was in his right mind, here, in our kitchen?

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.” I wasn’t sure. And I wasn’t fine.

  After the visitation—no one else visited—Sarah and I returned to our father’s house. We drank coffee, picked at the leftover sandwich triangles, picked at the comfortable, comforting conversational crumbs.

  “Aunt Abigail’s dimple?”

  “Yes, yes, I thought so too. Exactly like Dad’s.”

  “And her laugh? Did that sound like…?”

  “Yes, it did.”

  I tried not to pick at those other wounds that had not yet scabbed over, the ones Sarah wanted me to rip off.

  I’m not good at feelings, worse at expressing them. That’s not to say I don’t feel. I do. I felt a white-hot, cold-sweat, nauseous, flash-flood sweep through my entire body the moment the cop said, “Your father was deceased.” I felt a bilious volcanic bile in my gut the moment the chaplain pulled back the sheet in the morgue. “Is that your father?” My father in his black jogging pants, no top. Why hadn’t I chosen a shirt? His face blue. “Yes, that’s him.” And later, and worse, at home, alone, standing in the hallway seeing the snow that wouldn’t melt, hearing the wind that wouldn’t calm, and the door I couldn’t bring myself to close. In case? In case this was a dream from which a ringing telephone could wake me. I knew it wasn’t. At that moment I felt an unbearable pain-dagger plunge into my eye and through my brain and out the other side.

  That was how I felt, but how did it make me feel? Guilt, of course. I should never have left my father alone, should have told Liv I couldn’t go to that stupid staff meeting, to call me after and tell me what happened. My presence there would not have changed the outcome. My absence changed my father’s forever. I should have called Doris again from the newsroom, from the bar. I should never have gone to the bar.

  Dad’s death made me feel anger, at myself of course, but also at the world. At Global, for deciding to shut down the newspaper and triggering every other rotten event that day. At Doris, for sleeping through my call and not checking her messages when she woke up, then not realizing (how would she?) I would be at the bar, and therefore not calling me (because I don’t have a cellphone) after she found the door open and no one home. And at the snowstorm, and everything and anyone that was not me until I could no longer pretend it did not all inevitably come back to me.

  His death made me feel regret too, an unfillable emptiness at not having been that curious, caring son when I still had a sentient father to care for and be curious about. I regretted having refused to accept I could no longer provide him with what he needed and finding him a place to live with professional caregivers who would have made sure he didn’t wander off in a snowstorm and die, and mostly I felt remorse for not being with him at the end.

  My father’s demise also made me feel, I have to confess, relief. Now that his death had commuted our sha
red life sentence, I felt the weight of a burden I hadn’t known I was carrying slip away, replaced by an airy, unknowableness of promise and possibility. Relief.

  Feeling that, of course, only made me feel guilty again, and so the circle—guilt, anger, rage, regret, relief, guilt again—circled round and round in my head, unbroken.

  “I worry about you,” Sarah said into the silence. “I mean, I have Saul and the kids. What about you? Do you have someone? Someone special?”

  “I’m OK.”

  “I know you are. I just realized—and I know this is my fault—I’ve been away so long I don’t know any of your friends. Or your girlfriends.” She laughed. “The last one I remember was that one from high school, the girl you had that huge crush on. What was her name? Ellen.”

  Eleanor. Her name was Eleanor.

  “You know, I thought I saw her once,” Sarah filled in the silence. “Maybe ten years ago. On the street. In Portland. Oregon. Saul and I went there for a conference and this woman, the one who looked like she could have been her, walked right past us. She was with a young girl, a teenager. By the time I realized she might have been the one you knew and turned around to say something, she was gone.”

  Eleanor! With a girl? A teenager? It made no sense and yet, maybe, it did. I wanted to ask more, but then the moment—like Eleanor and the girl, like the memory of our last time together—was gone.

  “I’m going to try to do a better job of being part of your life,” Sarah said. “Now that Dad’s gone, there’s just the two of us. And I do worry about you.”

  Me too.

  ****

  Between the mains and desserts, Sarah slid an envelope across the table. I picked it up, looked at her quizzically.

  “I knew if I asked, you’d say no,” she said.

  I would have. I’d never been to a beach resort. I didn’t think I’d like it. But then, I’d never been to Jane’s on the Common either. And I liked it well enough. Sarah had suggested the restaurant. “You can never go wrong with their daily special,” she said. I hadn’t. She told me Jane’s was her favourite restaurant in Halifax. I tried to think whether I had a favourite. I didn’t. I worked nights. And then there’d been my father. I was still coming to terms with the sudden absence of everything I had known, and with the newfound presence of possibilities I had never considered. And with Sarah.

  It was as if our father’s death had freed Sarah, too, though I couldn’t be sure from what. Regret at having written herself out of our family’s life so many years before? Guilt at having left me with the burden of caring for our father? Sarah was still the all-knowing older sister, of course—she couldn’t help herself—but she’d also emerged, butterfly-like, as my all-protective, all mother-father-older-sister-lawyer friend.

  She’d accompanied me to the police station for my follow-up interview. After Sergeant Wilson hinted I could be charged with negligence causing death, Sarah cut him off, threatened to call her friend, Chester Rose, one of the city’s top criminal lawyers.

  “No need for that, ma’am,” Wilson said quickly. “We’re just talking hypotheticals here.”

  “I’d suggest, hypothetically, you stop trying to bully my client,” she replied sharply. When had I become her client? “And, not so hypothetically, that you have no grounds on which to charge him with anything.”

  Later that day, Wilson called to say Dad’s death had officially been ruled accidental, and the investigation was closed.

  Sarah also explained to me the terms of our father’s will, which she’d drawn up in 1987 after our mother died, and about which I’d never been told or bothered to ask. “You get everything,” she said, handing me the document. What? Why? “I just didn’t want anything to do with it,” she told me. “Not then. And not now either. Saul and I both do very well. I thought you might need it more. Officially, I’m the executor of the estate,” she continued. “I’m the lawyer, so that seemed to make sense at the time. But I’m in Calgary and you’re here, so you do what you think is right. I’ll sign off on whatever you decide.”

  Not that she didn’t have suggestions about what I should decide. “You should sell the house. Fix it up first—put in a new kitchen, a new bathroom, get rid of those goddamned jailhouse locks—and sell it. You’ll do all right, and you’ll be able to start fresh.”

  She’d offered to return in the spring to help me clear out our family’s accumulation of lived life and lost memories. Our mother’s clothes still hung in the closet in my parents’ bedroom. In the attic, there were boxes of photos, toys and books, tablecloths and old shoes. And, in the basement, boxes of jam jars, tools, skates, bicycle wheels, and other rusty, dusty debris.

  Sarah also invited me to visit Calgary in the summer “when the weather’s better” so I could spend time with her and Saul, get to know their kids. “They’re not kids anymore, you know,” she said. “Jacob’s twenty-four. Still living at home.” She shook her head. “He’s a rap singer. A white Jewish rap singer!” I’d forgotten Sarah converted to Judaism after she married Saul. Did that make their kids Jewish too?

  “There are lots of white rap singers,” I responded helpfully. “Like Eminem.” I’d edited that piece for the entertainment section. Eminem had apparently become a depressive, pill-popping, overweight, Elvis-like recluse, so his mother had written a tell-all book to save Eminem from himself, or cash in on his fame, whichever came first.

  “Jacob will be fine,” Sarah said definitively, brushing past Eminem. “He’ll grow out of it.” Subject shuttered. Switched. “Amy’s in her third year at UBC. She’s already studying for her LSATs. She’s talking about doing her law degree in the US, maybe at Harvard or Yale. You’d like her.” I’d probably like Jacob better, I thought.

  That was when she’d taken the envelope out of her purse, slid it across the table in my direction. “Cuba!” She smiled, as if she’d invented the place. “Two weeks! You deserve a break after your job, after Dad, after this winter you’ve been through. Take some time, Eli. Forget it all. Hang out on the beach. Drink some drinks. Relax. Figure out what you want to do next.”

  And so it was settled.

  Phantom

  Mariela sensed Alex hovering over her, a phantom disturbing her sleep, rearranging her dreams. Finally, he slipped into the bed beside her, the strange yet familiar scent of some other woman’s perfume invading her nostrils, reminding her of where he’d been, what he’d done. And then, suddenly, he was on top of her, his hot, alcohol-fumed mouth hungry on hers, the stale, slick stink of their commingled sweat and salt and sex assaulting her, his arousal rousing and arousing her.

  She didn’t want to. Not now. Not like this. But then she did. Some part of her must have. She had missed the sweetness of the boy-man he had once been, the Alex she had fallen in love with. She wanted that boy-man back.

  “Condom,” she whispered in his ear. She made him wear a condom when they had sex, partly because she worried what he might be bringing home from the resort on his penis, partly because she wasn’t ready to bring a child into their world. Not now. Not while they still lived here with her family.

  “Condom.” She said it again, more urgent this time. She heard him sigh, sensed his frustration, his anger, felt him shift his weight above her, his arm reaching across to the night table.

  “No, not those,” she told him. She didn’t trust the Chinese condoms the government handed out like candy. “Don’t you have any?” Alex often returned home with packages of fancy European condoms in his pocket. He’d claim some “gentleman” gave them to him as a tip. She didn’t believe him. But she trusted those condoms.

  “No,” he grunted. And he was back on top of her, his drunken fingers fumbling with the Chinese packaging. Finally, she took it from him, deftly freed its contents, reached down and rolled the condom over his erection with her fingers. Which was when she discovered that tear in the latex….

  “No, not ye
t!” she said. But it was already too late. He was inside her.

  And that was when she woke up. Every time. It had happened. All of it. And then it replayed, over and over, imagined but not. She wished it had never happened. She was so glad it had.

  Seniors’ Special

  Havana, 2017

  “We’re looking for something special,” the man explains. “Because it’s our last night. And because…well, you know.” I do.

  We are sitting on the second-floor balcony of the casa, companionably sipping cafecitos while savouring the scents and sounds and sensibilities that waft up from the streets of Centro Habana below. Mariela is still at work, showing another group of tourists her city. Tony is doing his homework.

  The man, whose name is Charles, is a retired carpenter from Bayonne, New Jersey. He and his wife, Sandra, who is back in their bedroom now, resting from their day’s adventures in Havana, had decided they must do “do Cuba” before it’s too late.

  “Now that that Trump bastard’s in the White House, who knows what will happen?” I do. Our American bookings for this year are already down by half, and everyone I know in the business says it is only going to get worse.

  Charles and Sandra had spent the first four days of their package tour at a beach resort in Varadero, sandwiching in this two-day whirlwind visit to Cuba’s capital before returning to Varadero and catching a flight home to the US. They’d found us on Tripadvisor, where we are highly rated. “Beautifully restored accommodation, centrally located, close to Old Havana,” gushed one reviewer. “Eli, who runs the casa, knows Havana well and speaks excellent English. Highly, highly recommended.” She’d signed her review, “Sarah from Halifax.” Sarah! Imagine that.

  “I only wish I’d known,” Charles confides. “What a city! If I’d realized, we would have spent all our time in Havana.” I wish he’d known too. Four more days of even one paying customer would have been a nice buffer against what I know is to come.