Come, Thou Tortoise Read online

  The phone rings and there is no one to answer it. I count the rings. Four. And then the machine picks up and it’s her.

  I lift my head.

  It’s her and she leaves a message and I can actually hear her voice because Linda and Chuck do not have secret voice mail that stays in the phone but real voice mail that broadcasts openly to the room at large. Which room I happen to be in.

  Hi Linda. Guess you’re at work.

  It’s really her. She says my name. She says something fishy. Then she says the word kelp. Something fishy happens to her voice when she says kelp. It starts to break up.

  Then: A tortoise cannot live by lettuce alone!

  You’re telling me. Come back.

  Kelp. And then nothing.

  The bard’s words blur beneath my feet.

  She sounded the same but different. Was the difference because I am getting so used to Chuck’s Shakespearean that he is becoming the current tenant. Oh perish the thought. Oh woe is me.

  Methinks I need a plan. I need a plan to get to Canada. I could walk. I have crossed the country on foot before. Part of it anyway. I could do it again. Or I could find a dashboard travelling east.

  I look at the door.

  After she had climbed the walls for a while, we started taking impromptu “vacations,” which involved setting out for places where you might expect to see cliffs. And therefore Cliff. We covered Oregon first. We went to the desert. Amazing that Oregon has one. We stopped in a town called Bend and stayed at a motel called the Swerve Right Inn. The Swerve was being renovated and she got a reduced rate in exchange for helping out with some bathroom tiling. Our room looked out onto the three mountains called the Three Sisters. While she tiled, I admired the view and wondered if it was possible that Cliff was hiking up or down one of those sisters. The next day we drove through a lightning storm to the mountains but saw no trace of him. I rode the dashboard and she said that when lightning hit the horizon it looked like it was hitting my shell.

  Well, that was a fun vacation, she said when we got home.

  Then we went to the ocean. It was all downhill to the ocean. We passed bicyclists who never had to pedal. We arrived and there was a beach with many dogs on it. She fell in love with a basset hound and later said she thought she would get a dog. Something with long ears that flapped in the wind.

  Okay, I do not have those.

  A basset hound puppy, she said.

  She was off her rocker. A puppy would bite off my legs and drink up my pool.

  On the beach there were cliffs with tunnels that led to other beaches. But there were also signs that said DO YOU KNOW WHEN HIGH TIDE IS. We didn’t. We went home. She never got the puppy.

  What I am thinking now is that when things are very bad, maybe you climb the walls and go in circles and that is normal, but then gradually you widen the circles until you are out the door. You widen and widen until you cross state lines. Because we did eventually hit California. Nevada. New Mexico. Arizona. We were slowly working our way east—looking for Cliff, yes, but also widening the circle—and eventually, maybe, we’d have cleared the continent.

  But a leap became necessary instead. A cross-continent leap at untortoisian speed. And now she is in another time zone and she needs kelp.

  Still perched on Lowering the Bard, I look over my shoulder at my castle and think: Hey, I am not in it. And it occurs to me that this is step one. Step one is get out of your castle. Step two is locate the door. Step three is the dashboard travelling east.

  Later, when Linda comes home, she plays Audrey’s message and looks at me while she listens. I put my head underwater at the word kelp.

  I think were fresh out of kelp, I hear Chuck say when I come up for air.

  Jesus Christ, Linda says. Can’t you hear it in her voice.

  Hear what.

  I climb out of my pool and head for the sad corner of my castle. The sad corner is the one farthest from the radiator.

  We do so have kelp, Linda is saying. She left us some.

  Where.

  She opens the fridge. Here.

  Please don’t tell me that’s kelp, Chuck says.

  Some kind of kelpish paste, yeah.

  I thought it was hummus.

  Uh, nope.

  Oh shit. And Chuck spits in the sink and gags in an exaggerated fashion that I find very insulting.

  You tortoise, Linda says.

  Also very insulting.

  She reads the label and says, You don’t want to know.

  What I really want is some lettuce. Fresh lettuce of the iceberg variety. Crisp as paper. I can almost live by that alone.

  In the obituary, written by yours truly, the deceased is referred to as Water Flowers. Pretty punny if you ask me. Uncle Thoby thought it was punny too. This morning, before the funeral, we were laughing so hard we had to hold on to the kitchen counter, which is a sign of real laughter. Rule Number One of Real Laughter: Are you holding on to something. Say the counter or someone’s shoulder. Do you have to put down your beverage. Then you are really laughing. Or maybe crying.

  We were really laughing until Toff showed up with his own newspaper folded in that special Toffish way and said, You don’t. You just don’t. His face was as purple as his cravat. Smack went the newspaper on the counter.

  Don’t what, I said.

  Make a mockery of a man’s name.

  Calm down, said Uncle Thoby.

  Yes you do, I said.

  What.

  Make a mockery.

  Oddly.

  It’s going on the headstone too, I said, my voice spiralling. So there, so there.

  Uncle Thoby stepped between us and said, She’s kidding. It was a mistake. But one that Walter would have loved.

  He would not have loved it, Toff said.

  Whereupon I stepped between Toff and Uncle Thoby and said, I think we know what my dad would have loved better than you, executor. You come here with your Hellvetica font.

  My what.

  Oddly. Hand on shoulder.

  My dad’s will was in Hellvetica. I know hell when I see it.

  Toff was briefly silent. He picked up the newspaper. “Far from peacefully,” he quoted. Was that necessary.

  Yes.

  Collision. Say accident for God’s sake. Or better yet, say nothing at all. And why name the medulla oblongata.

  Why not name it.

  Okay, why capitalize it.

  Rule Number One of Capitalization, I said. If it matters hugely, capitalize. You might need it for an acronym later.

  Toff just stared at me. Then he went on: It makes him—it makes Walter sound like a brain on the sidewalk.

  Which image made me laugh. I nudged Uncle Thoby. But he was not joining in. Why aren’t you joining in, I said.

  I’ve tied a black ribbon to Wedge’s wheel so he can’t run today. He looks miserable, hunched in the corner of his terrarium, his back to the room. Funny how everyone gravitates towards him. As if it’s Wedge they must pay their respects to.

  The house creaks under the weight of people I don’t know. Colleagues, grad students. Of course there are islands of people I do know. Clint has his own island. So does Byrne Doyle. Never the twain shall meet. Except on our front lawn, where Uncle Thoby has put a Byrne Doyle sign and a Clint sign shoulder to shoulder.

  Somehow I have lost Uncle Thoby. In our own house. And where is Toff.

  There is election talk. Someone in the Wedge queue says, Byrne Doyle, bless his heart. The Poles have not been kind to him.

  They are unreliable.

  Yes, an actual queue has formed beside the mantelpiece.

  A hand touches my arm.

  Patience is not in the queue. She is not one for mice, generally. Although she looks a bit like one. She is short with white hair and round black eyes. She puts a small box in my hand.

  What’s this.

  I made it myself.

  Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, is a bar of soap with the words WALTER FLOWERS is DEAD carved
on the surface.

  Oh.

  It’s called a Grief Bar, she says. You wash with it, and when those words disappear, so too will your grief.

  I exhale slowly. Bollocks, Patience.

  She pats my arm because I am such a chip off the old block.

  Patience has been my dad’s secretary for as long as I can remember. She department-hopped with him, from Psychology to Biology, Biology to Neuroscience, Neuroscience to Biogerontology. I think that’s the right order. Biogerontology comes last anyway. It is, or was, a department of one. Just my dad. Who somehow persuaded the powers that be that he needed his own full-time secretary.

  Sometimes, if my dad was in class, I was allowed to put my feet up on his desk and hold office hours. No one ever showed up except Patience. She’d sit in the student chair and ask me why she’d done so poorly on her last test.

  Look, Patience. You are totipotent.

  How do you mean.

  You are potentially anything but a mermaid.

  I see.

  Go away and try harder.

  I loved her for that. And I loved how she saw my dad from the outside. How to her he was boyish. Silly but endearing Walter. Up to no good in that lab of his. With his long-lived mice. You couldn’t help, at the end of the day, but fall a little in love with him. Which Patience did. And she showed that love by not taking him too seriously, and by protecting him like a Rottweiler. She always took his side. It didn’t matter that there weren’t sides. She took his side against the psychologists (who had no souls), against the biologists (who had no backbones), against the neuroscientists (who had no hearts). My dad was right to leave them all. He was right to start his own little operation.

  My own little operation, said my dad. Is that what I have.

  If you build it, they will come, she said.

  Who will, asked my dad, not catching the reference. And do we want them.

  She wagged her finger.

  My dad’s heart was in the right place, she liked to say. And at the end of the day—something else she liked to say—at the end of the day, my dad was harmless.

  Which was apparently a good thing.

  But for me, sometimes, at the end of the day, the question I found myself asking was, How harmless is Patience.

  Because one Christmas she gave my dad one of those pink Energizer bunnies, except instead of holding a drum, it was holding a sign that said ENGINEERED NEGLIGIBLE SENESCENCE. That was pretty funny. Wasn’t it.

  I don’t know because I didn’t get it. I told Patience, We prefer Duracell. We are Duracell people.

  But my dad thought the bunny was funny. Or he said he did. He kept it on his desk. It was the first thing you saw when you came into his office.

  But I had a bad feeling about the bunny. And sometimes, when I had my feet up on his desk, I kicked it. Not hard. I mean, I loved Patience, but my dad was not just a pipe-dream smoker, or whatever the expression is. He was not just a bunny beating a sign.

  And quite often, walking home with my silly, endearing, harmless dad, I would have hurt feelings. On his behalf. I would ask to be lifted. Piggybacked. Forgiven. On account of his brain being light years deep and Patience not seeing that. Because he would have us live forever, Patience. Not a stupid battery.

  There was something so wounding about the bunny.

  And there is something wounding about the Grief Bar. Was it a bar of Irish Spring in a past life.

  Notice I spelled his name right, Patience says. A reference to the obituary.

  I nod. You know what would be really amazing, Patience. If, when the words WALTER FLOWERS IS DEAD disappeared, my dad stopped being dead.

  More patting of my arm. More chipping off the old block.

  What I am thinking now is that some jokes are okay and some are not. The Energizer bunny joke is not. But Patience is, I suspect, offended by the obituary. As is Toff. Maybe people who loved my dad can be divided into two categories: Those who mind the obituary and those who mind the bunny.

  I swim through the crowd and find Uncle Thoby on Clint’s island. This is good. This is a safe place to be. Where’s Toff, I ask him.

  He looks around.

  Nevermind, I say. Let him be lost.

  He asks what’s in the box. I show him the Grief Bar. He looks upset until I tell him it’s from Patience. Oh. That makes sense then.

  It’s Irish Spring, isn’t it.

  He sniffs, then sings softly: Manly yes, but I like it too.

  Clint puts an arm around me. Oh my darlin, oh my duck. I am hugged into a dark grey armpit. There’s a Clint’s cab on his breast pocket. Clint is very meaty and warm. Can I get one of these shirts, I mumble.

  Not unless you come work for me. I’m hiring.

  Since when are you a politician, Clint.

  Since this election.

  You won’t really go to Ottawa, will you.

  Don’t think there’s much chance of that, sweetheart.

  Just this morning, though, one of Clint’s campaign flyers came in the mail, and on the front was a picture of a Clint’s cab driving off into a sunset with a long orange scarf blowing out the window—and where was that cab going if not Ottawa.

  That sunset was local, Clint says.

  Still, it is an odd image for a campaign flyer. And I was thinking of it earlier at the cemetery when the sun slanted through the bare trees at two o’clock. The sun was already setting. I’m going to slip away early today. Stuff on my plate. So down it went, eggy, into the snow.

  And my hand curled around the flyer in my pocket and I thought about how sunsets are for people to drive off, or die off, into.

  I had checked the mail before we left for the funeral, because checking the mail is something I do, and why should today be different. Toff had tried to check it and I’d yelled at him. Which made Uncle Thoby wince and Toff step back from the mailbox like it had a bomb in it. There was no mail except the campaign flyer.

  I held on to the flyer all through the funeral.

  My dad would have voted for Clint, and if Clint is deprived of an Ottawa sunset by one vote, it will be because my dad is not here to cast his ballot.

  Do not look at the hole in the ground.

  I did not look at the hole in the ground. I looked at the prison, which borders the cemetery. How do I feel about my dad’s feet pointing for all eternity at a prison. Um.

  I had always assumed this cemetery was for convicts. But no, Uncle Thoby assured me, this is a cemetery for anyone, it just happens to be next to the prison. Oh. So the prisoners can look out their windows, sorry slots, and see a slice of burial. Or a slice of Quite-a-Bite-of Lake. (The cemetery, the prison, and the lake make a triangle.) Imagine watching the Regatta through a window so skinny you cannot see a full boat. Just sections of boat. Bites of boat.

  Poor prisoners. The backside of the prison is baby blue. Do they know the back of their prison is baby blue.

  The sun was setting and my nose was running. I had no Kleenex so I had to use the campaign flyer. Whereupon ten people at the graveside thrust tissues at me. Thanks, thanks. Too kind.

  They think I am crying.

  Am I really going to be able to leave my dad here with his feet pointing at the prison for all eternity and go back to the house for a post-part-him party or whatever it’s called.

  Uncle Thoby’s orange glove touches my shoulder.

  Concentrate on the baby blue backside of the jail and the windows designed for shooting arrows. Because what else could fit through such a window. Well, a paper. A message. And the moment I think message I see one. I get one. I see a note falling from a window. The wind actually picks it up and carries it in my direction. I lift my hands. A note, a note. But alas, it snags on the barbed wire atop the prison wall.

  So naturally I run over to the wall. I run towards the note, which is not a note. And which, even if it were a note, is not one I could ever reach because the wall is five people tall. I run over to the wall and my shadow is tall enough to reach the note but I am
not. Still, I leap like a ballerina in the air. A note, a note.

  Then I see. It’s the wrapper from a Piety pastry. Goddamn it. I used to love Piety pastries. I ate one every day for ten years in the GOLEM cafeteria.

  There are no messages to be had.

  Someone in the Wedge queue says, Should those flowers be put in Walter.

  Or maybe I mishear.

  I am standing at the window, my own island, when a familiar car pulls into Jim Ryan’s driveway. Bold little Lada (still running!) and Verlaine leaps out. Wow, she is parking in Jim Ryan’s crescent without permission. She’s not wearing a coat.

  She does an extended trot across the lawn.

  I run to the door to greet her. She hugs me. Bare arms. Hair all alert. Audray. She kisses me Swissly. Right cheek, left cheek, right cheek.

  I think the reason the Swiss kiss like this is to delay for as long as possible looking into the eyes of the person they are greeting.

  She says she was not at the service because there was a pigeon crisis at the Before Building that required her immediate attention.

  Still not looking at me.

  A pigeon crisis.

  She is wearing a white polo shirt with a black horse on the breast. Almost all her shirts have horses. She buys them for the horses. But if you ask her who is Ralph Lauren, she can’t tell you.

  You look unslept, she says.

  Now she is looking at me. It just took her awhile.

  In the living room we skip to the front of the Wedge queue.

  Ah, there he is, she says. My little sandwich. My little Wedge of sand. She pats her stomach. I am feeling a bit peckish, Audray.

  That old joke.

  Speaking of jokes, she says. The biography in the paper.

  The obituary.

  Yes, that.

  Behind us, the queue disperses. Clearly we aren’t moving on. Wedge looks at me over his shoulder, like, bloody hell what is this.

  Verlaine gives me a thumbs-up on the obituary. Were you behind it, she says.

  Yes and no.

  Oui ou non.

  Oui.

  Walter would approve.

  We are joined at the mantel by Jim Ryan (Are you the proprietor of that adorable Russian antique parked in my crescent), Byrne Doyle, Dr. O’Leery, and a stranger. Hey, we are our own island.