Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Read online

  “I’d be happy to drive her out. Can I get you anything?”

  “Jesus Christ. I’d love a tea.”

  He hunted for the teabags in every cupboard in the kitchen, even under the sink where there were at least twenty pickled herring jars of striated fat, before noticing the tin on the stove. “What do you take?” he called.

  Mr.Virtanen coughed up the word sugar.

  David helped Mr. Virtanen sit up in the bed and rearranged the pillows. The cases, stained almost to transparency, reminded him of bacon grease on a paper towel. He placed the cup carefully in Mr. Virtanen’s hands, held the sugar bowl up. “Tell me when.” He had to break through the crust. “Just nod,” he said after four spoons. Mr. Virtanen nodded at six.

  “So Mr. Virtanen.”

  “Mike.”

  “Mike. I know a little bit about you. You were born in Finland, is that right?”

  The Hospice Society had given David a file with general information about his client and suggestions for facilitating conversation. He’d been a logger, but now Mr. Virtanen could hardly raise a mug to his lips. Find something you have in common. Other than the obvious, David and Mr. Virtanen were both widowers. That was it. Most traces of Mrs. Virtanen had vanished. A dirty sham on one of the pillows. The bedspread was pink but Mr. Virtanen had covered it with a grey wool blanket. David still kept things exactly the way Marilyn had.

  Mr. Virtanen slurped tea through the filter of his moustache. He closed his eyes and sighed a word David didn’t quite hear. Swami, it sounded like.

  Bring pictures of your family. Be prepared to talk about yourself and your interests to start things off. David had left the envelope containing the photos in the back seat of the car. Slipping out to get them would only give Mr. Virtanen another chance to die.

  The huge hand slackened, leaving the cup of hot liquid balanced in the folds of the blanket.

  “Is the tea all right?” David asked.

  Snoring replaced the coughing and David took the cup away. He looked around the room while he waited for Mr. Virtanen to wake. A giant’s steel-toed boot sat on the dresser beside a coffee can filled with shells. Hummocks of dirty clothes all over the floor. He glanced at his watch and decided: ten more minutes. He’d leave a note. He hoped Mr. Virtanen could read.

  As soon as David stepped out of the trailer, he inhaled a great draft of air to flush his lungs. His chest burned. He was able to manoeuvre the car backward through the trees, but once on the road he began to cough. He opened the windows, but the cold air only made the coughing worse. It got so bad he had to pull over. Now he was dizzy. His every breath seemed to be drawn from a sticky wet bag inside him. Should he turn on the flashers? Honk for help?

  He rested his forehead against the wheel, trying not to panic.

  David’s sister, Susan, called that night. Since Marilyn had died, Susan called every Sunday from her Monday morning in Sydney, Australia, after getting the kids off to school. David and his sister had ended up on opposite sides of the world. The dark of his night was Susan’s eye-blinking noon, his winter her summer, but now, to his alarm, spring was nudging its way in. He had noticed the swell in the rhododendron buds, and crocuses—purple, yellow, white—colonizing the lawn.

  “Do you have a cold?” she asked.

  “It’s just a tickle in the throat.”

  He was still in bed where he’d retreated after the careful drive home. He’d slept all afternoon and now it was dark. The phone and his own coughing had woken him.

  “It’s almost a year,” Susan reminded him.

  “Is it?” It felt longer. Much.

  “Have you done anything, David?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you cleared out the closets, for example? That would be a start.”

  She dropped the subject and moved on to her incidental news. Then they said goodbye for the week. Because he respected his sister, after their conversation he got out of bed and took a trial walk to the window. In the void of the Strait of Georgia, too overcast for stars, a barge was making its way up the coast, dragging its light. He was still coughing, but the vertigo was gone.

  He went to the closet and randomly selected a hanger from Marilyn’s side, a pale blue skirt and blouse she’d had made out of the silk someone had sent her. Who? She hadn’t had a chance to wear the outfit. The Normans. After Bob retired, the Normans had bought a sailboat. Peggy had sent the fabric from Thailand. They’d missed the funeral. David remembered Marilyn unfolding the silk on the dining-room table, exclaiming. He paused to cough, then returned the outfit to the closet and took down the long denim skirt Marilyn had Saturdayed in. She must have hung it back up unwashed; it had retained the shape of her body. They’d lived together through many of Marilyn’s sizes, David as constant at fourteen as eight.

  As for his side of the closet, David saw that he was the owner of five identical white dress shirts and six in different shades of blue. He broke off coughing. Suits that he hadn’t worn since the eighties found sanctuary here. He took three of the white shirts and four blue and laid them on the bed. He was ruthless with the suits, keeping one and the two tweed jackets they’d bought in Ireland. How many belts does a man require? He coughed again. When he’d finished with the closet, he started on the drawers, and by the time he went to bed he’d filled four garbage bags with his clothes.

  The next morning he felt himself again, more or less, except for the irritating cough, so there was no need to call in sick. He put the bags of clothes in the trunk of the car to drop off at the men’s shelter on his way home from work.

  The second time he visited Mr. Virtanen, David was surprised by the improvement in the old man. In less than a week Mr. Virtanen was able to answer the door trailing forbidden clouds of smoke. The radiation had exhausted him, David realized. The same thing had happened to Marilyn.

  “Out and about, Mike?” he said, sincerely delighted because he really, really did not want to stay inside the fuggy trailer. It was the cause of his breathing difficulties the week before, he was sure. “Do you feel well enough to go for a drive?”

  Mr.Virtanen looked past David on the step. “What’s that? A Honda?”

  “It’s made by Honda. It’s an Acura.”

  One hand on the wall, Mr. Virtanen stepped on the back of his slipper and drove the other foot inside. When both slippers were on, he reached for David’s arm and David helped him down the steps. They paused at the bottom where, like a weather vane reading a shifting breeze, the old man shuffled slowly around. He pointed to the shed. “That’s my sauna.” He pronounced it sou-na and David remembered he was a Finn.

  “When did you come to Canada?” he asked when he’d got Mr. Virtanen in the car.

  “Nineteen fifty-one,” said Mr. Virtanen, sounding disgusted because, though David had moved the seat all the way back, his knees still kissed the dash.

  “I was born in 1951,” said David. “It might help if you recline the seat. There’s a lever. A lot of Finns settled around here.”

  “I don’t know any of them,” said Mr. Virtanen, fumbling for the lever.

  David started the car so he could open the windows and blow the smell out. Abruptly the seat released, throwing Mr. Virtanen flat on his back. “Jesus Christ!” he roared. He started to laugh. Then he started to cough. David got out of the car and hurried around to open the passenger door. When he was upright again, Mr. Virtanen hawked on the ground. It was, not surprisingly, yellow.

  As soon as they got on the road Mr. Virtanen said he wanted to go into town. David nodded. A few silent minutes passed while Mr. Virtanen searched his pockets. The manila envelope of photos was still on the back seat. He should have given it to Mr. Virtanen so they could talk about the pictures as they drove. Mr. Virtanen took out a cigarette. No: a tight roll of bills girdled with an elastic band. “I like to go to the liquor store.”

  Relieved he wouldn’t have to ask him not to smoke, David said, “Sure,” and Mr. Virtanen magically started talking.
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br />   “I don’t like these Jap cars. Too small. Only Japs can drive them. And the Japs get the jobs. No, I don’t hang around with the Finns. If I wanted to be with the Finns I stay in Finland. Next time we go out in the New Yorker.”

  “You’ve never gone back to Finland?”

  “No! I couldn’t. I run away. I got a girl pregnant. I guess I ruined her life but she saved mine because I got away. There’s no justice, eh?” He looked sidelong at David. “You’re probably sitting there thinking cancer is my justice.”

  “I certainly am not.”

  “You’re not religious?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you were. A pastor or something.”

  “My wife passed away last year. A Hospice volunteer met with me. The volunteers visit the bereaved as well as the dying. I’m just returning the favour.”

  “What do you do with yourself?”

  “Good question. My wife was the social convenor, so to speak.”

  “I mean work.”

  “Oh. I have an engineering firm. Elton Consulting. We do mostly infrastructure. Roads.”

  “Well. Cancer is because I smoke all my life. It’s not justice. It’s cause and affect.”

  When they got to the liquor store, Mr. Virtanen gave David his tube of money. “I only got my slippers on. You go in. Get a two-six of Finlandia.”

  He woke gasping. Somehow the pillow had fallen over his face. He threw it off and sat up in the dark, sucking, sucking, trying to catch his breath. He couldn’t draw. His mouth hung open, useless. Then, from deep in his chest, something ominous. A long, low rattle.

  Outside in the vast bellows of the ocean, fluid surged, retreated.

  “It could be asthma,” Dr. Cowan told him. “Or it could be a panic attack. Have you ever had one?”

  “No. People don’t suddenly get asthma, do they?”

  “Sure they do. How are you otherwise?”

  “Fine.”

  “The anniversary of a loved one’s passing is significant.” She’d been Marilyn’s doctor too. “Very often people ask for help.”

  “Now this may sound silly,” said David. “Is cancer contagious?”

  “How do you know it wasn’t a panic attack if you’ve never had one?”

  Dr. Cowan arranged for him to have some tests done at the hospital the next day. That evening the Hospice Society coordinator phoned to tell him Mr. Virtanen had been admitted to palliative care and would not be going back home.

  “He looked so much better last time,” said a surprised David, though this wasn’t really true. He’d looked just as bad, but with energy. Before Marilyn died she’d had the same vital spurt, like she was squeezing the last bit of life out of the tube. It had confused David. Just as he thought she was recovering, she died. She died of ovarian cancer four months after taking her stomach ache to Dr. Cowan. Susan, who had three kids, said the same thing happened just before a woman had a baby. Unable to waddle to the corner store the day before, she’d suddenly leap up, clean the whole house and bake a cake.

  At the hospital, he blew into a plastic tube attached to a machine. They X-rayed his chest. Afterward, he went upstairs to see Mr. Virtanen. Of course he recognized the nurses and they, him. They greeted him by name at Save-On Foods too, but that was different.

  Mr.Virtanen was sleeping. He looked yellower lying on clean white sheets.

  A nurse came in to take his vital signs. “Hi Mr. Elton.” David blushed. She was one of the nurses Marilyn had tried to fix him up with at the end. A red-blonde ponytail and slightly overlapping front teeth. He put her at twenty-three. What a joke. “Stop,” he’d told Marilyn. “Please stop with the fixing up.”

  “Are you a friend of Mike’s, Mr. Elton?”

  “I’m volunteering with the Hospice Society now.”

  “That’s so cool,” she said and David started to sweat because he couldn’t be sure that Marilyn hadn’t been trying to fix him up from the nurse’s end too.

  “Is Mike going to wake up?”

  “Probably not,” she said.

  The first weekend in May, David took out a suitcase and packed it with most of his remaining clothes. As he was doing this, the doorbell rang. He thought it might be the paper boy; he’d left a note suspending delivery. Instead he found a tall woman with short grey hair: Wendy French, the Hospice Society coordinator, out of context. He’d met her only once, at the volunteer training session. After that, all of their dealings had been by phone.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you, Wendy. Come in.”

  “What a beautiful home,” she said.

  They’d had it built in 1980, he explained, when they first moved to Campbell River. On the cliff side was a deck with steps down to the lower garden. The plants there were all native, because of the wind. Forty-two stairs down to the beach. The sheltered front of the house, which faced the road, was where Marilyn had planted her rhodos, the reason he was packing. He didn’t tell Wendy this.

  “Coffee? It’s made.”

  He came back to the living room where he’d got Wendy settled and set the tray on the coffee table. He felt perfectly adept at this task. When he and Marilyn had had dinner parties, when they’d hosted the folksinging group, he made and distributed the tea and coffee. Afterward, he cleaned up.

  “I’ve got some bad news,” Wendy said, taking hers black. “Mr.Virtanen passed away last night.”

  David set down his cup and coughed into his hand. “Oh, dear,” said Wendy after a minute of this. “I’ll get you a drink of water.” She found her way to the kitchen and came back with a glass. David drank and the coughing eventually let up.

  “I always deliver the news in person the first time. Sometimes volunteers have more of a reaction than they think.”

  David picked up a napkin and while Wendy busied herself looking for something in her briefcase, he wiped the tears out of his eyes, some of which were from coughing. He was surprised by his reaction, and not. Surprised because he hardly knew Mr. Virtanen. Not surprised because, more than the cooking, he found feeling the most challenging aspect of widowhood. During his marriage, he had only been vaguely aware of how strictly apportioned his and Marilyn’s roles were. Marilyn emoted. David banked. He was pretty certain that had he died first, Marilyn would have banked with aplomb, but he couldn’t claim the reverse.

  “Do you want another client?”

  “Yes.”

  Wendy opened a file folder on the coffee table. “His name is Charles Wilson. He goes by Chucky. He’s forty-four. A veteran. He’s more or less homebound with HIV-AIDS.”

  David accepted the folder. He cleared his throat. “For the next few weeks I won’t be at this telephone number in the evenings. You can still leave a message, or call me on the cell. Or at the Seaview.”

  “The Seaview Motel?”

  “Yes,” said David.

  There were over thirty species of rhododendrons in the front yard, every possible colour, some taller than David, the smallest ankle height, all of them about to climax simultaneously.

  Dear Mr. Elton,

  Enclosed please find a translation of the letter you received from Armi Kuusela. I actually didn’t mind doing the translation at all. I was doing it at home, not on Embassy time, for practice. For your information, your correspondent has the same name as the Finnish contestant who won the very first Miss Universe pageant in 1952. You will find this and similar interesting facts about Finland on our website, www.factsaboutfinland.com. This month’s feature article is about our annual World Wife-Carrying Championship!

  Sincerely best wishes,

  Sari Nurmi, Assistant to the Ambassador

  On Monday the hospital phoned David at work. He thought it was about his tests.

  “No. This is with regards to Mr. Mikko Virtanen. You were his Hospice volunteer I understand.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Did he mention to you his final wishes?”

  “Yes. He wanted a bottle of vodka.”

  “I m
ean his remains. Did he say what he wanted done with them?”

  “It never came up.”

  “We’re asking you because he has no next of kin and we need a signature.”

  “For what?”

  “To cremate.”

  “He has a next of kin.”

  “He does?”

  “He told me—well, there’s probably a grown child in Finland.”

  “All right. That’s not what it says here, but anyway. Mr. Elton, could you please contact Mr. Virtanen’s next of kin and have him advise us on this matter?”

  “Me?” David said.

  The VSO came through town that spring. Marilyn and David were subscribers to everything, holders of every kind of pass. David had promised to keep it all up. On his beloved wife’s deathbed he’d told a lie.

  “And who are you going to do these things with?” she’d asked.

  “I’ll do them alone.”

  He didn’t. He didn’t ski anymore. He didn’t folksing. He didn’t go to plays or concerts until he found the tickets, the last in the series, for an all-Sibelius concert.

  He asked Chucky if he wanted to go. David played poker with Chucky once a week in his basement bachelor apartment where Chucky was dying of his tattoos. “It was a dirty needle,” Chucky had been quick to explain. “Man, I was a tattoo tourist. Everyplace I went in the army I got one. I’m my own charm bracelet.” He was shackled at the wrists with Celtic knots and chains of Sanskrit. The snout of the dragon he carried against his heart poked out of his snaggy terry cloth robe.

  “The symphony?” Chucky laid down a flush and David groaned.

  “It’s Sibelius.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, the great Finnish composer.”

  “Never heard of him, but what the hell. I’m not doing nothing else.”

  When the evening came, though, Chucky wasn’t feeling well enough. “I got those runs again, man. I got the chills.” David was already dressed. He’d come to pick Chucky up. The tickets were in his pocket. Chucky had cancelled, but he’d called David at home when David was still at the Seaview.

  The only unfilled seat in the Tidemark Theatre was the one beside David. The music swirled around him, thick and light, aggregate flakes. Out of the white, a parade emerged, then vanished. A thousand white birds lifted off a frozen lake. David knew practically nothing about Finland. Maybe Chucky had been. He pictured a tattoo of snow, blurred and white.