The Winter Wives Read online

  –You’ve got some shoulders, he said.

  –Don’t we all.

  –I think I’ve seen you in the weight room.

  –Could be.

  There was the clack of a lock and the squawk of a door opening above us.

  I was surprised when he stayed with me in the food line, because by then there were other guys around wearing football jackets. But he also came and sat with me.

  –You’re limping, he said.

  –I should tell you that it’s one thing I’m very good at. I have a great deal of experience limping.

  He blushed.

  –So, like, that’s permanent. What happened?

  –An accident, I said.

  –Really? What kind of accident?

  –I fell down.

  –Off a horse or what?

  –No. I just tripped and fell. Then my mother ran over me.

  –You’re shitting me. With what?

  –I was only five. I don’t remember much. Where are you from?

  –Toronto.

  –And how did you end up in Nova Scotia?

  –I got recruited.

  –I hardly ever follow football.

  –Byron, eh?

  –It’s a nickname. I was born Angus.

  –Angus, huh. I like Angus. It has character.

  –An old name in the family. I’d rather you called me Byron if you don’t mind.

  My mother had named me for her younger brother. She always called me Angus. My father didn’t like my mother’s younger brother. I was Boy to him. He never called me Angus.

  * * *

  —

  I’ve never really understood why we became friends. Allan was a city guy. I was seriously rural. I was still living on the farm where I was born. He had the air of someone who was well-to-do, never stuck for spending money. Mom and I scraped by, living off the land and a commercial fishing licence we inherited after Dad died suddenly, not long before I first met Allan. I was earnest about learning. I was disciplined. Education was my ticket out of poverty. He had no academic interest at all. He worked hard enough to achieve the grades to let him keep on playing football.

  He was big physically, unlike me. He was strong, good-looking. He strode the campus and the town, comfortably indifferent to how he was perceived by lesser mortals. We were noticed, I suppose, when we were together, because of the contrast.

  I knew the Winter sisters from high school. We moved in different circles at university, but I’d see one or both from time to time and, like everybody else, they seemed to be intrigued by my apparent friendship with the Great Chase.

  If I could have seen the future, it wouldn’t have surprised me that, one day, he and Peggy Winter would be close. They were beings from the same genetic pool. Like Allan, she was tall, athletic. She followed sports, and could discuss team standings as if they really mattered to her.

  She was, physically, unlike her sister, Annie, who was classically blond with startling blue eyes. Peggy’s hair was auburn, her eyes deep-set and dark, some days green and some days hazel, depending on the light. Allan never seemed to notice Peggy at the time, which I found odd. Then I discovered that feigning indifference is sometimes a subtle tactic to get attention.

  And it worked for Allan. Peggy wasn’t used to being overlooked.

  One day in the university bookstore, she sidled up and tugged my sleeve.

  –How do you know that football guy?

  –What football guy?

  –The big fella. The Great Chase.

  –Oh. Allan. Why?

  –You should introduce us. He looks interesting.

  –Sure, I said.

  And I did, but nothing came of it. Not then. There was no chemistry, I guess. Now that I think of it, the chemistry people talk about was always missing, even after they became a couple. It never occurred to me, back then, to ask Allan what he thought of Peggy.

  –He’s an odd one, that friend of yours, she said to me some days after I’d arranged the introductions.

  –What friend?

  –That one you set me up with. That Allan.

  –Set you up?

  –You know what I mean.

  –No.

  I was laughing at her and her cheeks went red.

  –How do you know he isn’t queer? she said.

  –Queer?

  –Don’t act stupid.

  –How would I know?

  –You’re together all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if people thought that.

  * * *

  —

  The front desk confirmed that Peggy had checked in, but she didn’t answer when I called the room and she wasn’t in the dining room or at the bar. I called her cellphone, but the call went straight to voice mail. I concluded she’d gone directly to the hospital.

  I hate hospitals. I spent so much time in hospital when I was just a boy, I grow physically weak whenever I’m near one. But I got into my car and drove there anyway.

  I found Peggy sitting on the side of Allan’s bed. His eyes were closed, and a plastic oxygen mask covered his mouth and nose. I nodded in her direction, feeling faint. Allan opened his eyes and smiled, lifted a limp hand then let it drop. The cheek on the right side of his face was drooping, the corner of his mouth slightly twisted downward.

  –I can come back another time, I said.

  But he shook his head, removed the plastic mask and slurred out a word that sounded like “stay.” Then he gestured weakly toward the chair.

  –Zzzzit, he instructed.

  Spittle trickled from the corner of his mouth. I sat. He closed his eyes again.

  Soon, he snored.

  Peggy said, I’m glad you came. It was important for him to see you.

  She stood.

  –I know how hospitals affect you. Let’s step outside.

  She tilted her chin toward the door.

  And in the corridor, she informed me that, according to the specialist, Allan had suffered brain damage. It was going to take a lot of rehab just to restore minimal mobility. The doctor thought he’d regain his speech, but the right side of his body would likely always be a problem.

  –The worst thing will be no more golf, she said.

  –If that’s the worst thing…

  –I specifically asked, and the doctor told me Allan will be lucky if he gets enough mobility to walk around the house.

  She shook her head, rubbed her hands over her face.

  –It’ll kill him, she said. It will slowly destroy him.

  I put my arms around her and she leaned in.

  –When can he go home? I asked.

  –They think he can travel in a few days.

  –Will he be okay in a car?

  –I think so. I know that’s what he’d want. The thought of another ambulance. Jesus. But I dread getting him through the airport.

  –I’ll go with you, I said.

  –Would you?

  She stepped back and studied my face hard, reading my thoughts. Allan in a bed. Allan unlikely to ever again be far away from bed.

  –He’s going to be all right, she said.

  I looked back at him, wired and tubed, and I was thinking of my father and what he’d been spared—what we’d all been spared. Sudden death seemed not so bad in comparison.

  –He’ll bounce back like he always does, Peggy said.

  –For sure, I said.

  But I was thinking about gravity and falling down. How Dad and eventually Mom fell down and bounced into oblivion. And my uncle, Angus, falling down, off the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge in Halifax.

  How I fell down and, yes, bounced back. Improved in so many ways. But, as I see it, bouncing back is the exception.

  Before I left the hospital, Peggy asked if we could meet for dinner
back at the hotel.

  3.

  The thing about Allan is that he really believed what he often used to say: you have to live as though you’re never going to die. That means taking care of yourself. Staying fit. Everything in moderation.

  He’d say, We can’t stay young, but we can stay mobile. It just takes work.

  Death is the absence of mobility, he’d say. Or the other way around: mobility is the denial of death.

  I might have been offended by his obsession with physical mobility, except that I knew he saw me as he saw himself. He never viewed me as the lame guy, the guy who grew up with the reality of falling down. The guy who, for a large part of his young life, lived under the control of other people, not to mention drugs.

  For Allan, drugs were optional, part of the existential experience he craved. It seemed he couldn’t get enough experience. He seemed to think there isn’t any bad experience, that we should look at it all as education.

  –Lucky you, I’d say.

  –The quality of life is all in how we look at things, he told me once.

  The first time I saw anybody roll a joint, experienced the weed smoke second-hand, it was with Allan and his teammates.

  He’d say, Life is just a big buffet.

  I’d say something like, That’s deep, Allan, I’m going to write that down. I’m going to use that.

  He’d ignore the sarcasm: We’re all hostages, prisoners in time. It’s our duty to resist.

  –Resist what exactly?

  –Everything. But time and gravity, especially. It’s gravity that knocks us down.

  –So you should be careful about getting high.

  –Very droll, Byron.

  * * *

  —

  It was Easter weekend the first time he visited our farm. The big ice was still in and the gulf looked like the winter prairie. It sprawled forever, flat and white. The winds that swept across the ice from the north and northwest were bitter. The fields were all dead grass and dirty snow, the nearby forest menacing. The sky was iron grim.

  –What’s this place called if it’s on the map?

  –Malignant Cove, I said.

  –Seriously?

  –Seriously.

  –Where did that name come from?

  –Not a clue, I said.

  –So what happens to all that ice? It just melts away?

  –I’m not sure. One morning you wake up and it’s gone. I think the wind must take it. It usually breaks up by the first of May, when the fishing starts.

  –Hard to imagine. Your father was a fisherman?

  –Among other things.

  –I guess you miss him.

  –I got over it.

  –Uh huh.

  –Yours? You never talk about him. You get along?

  –Hard to say. He’s too busy being busy to talk much about anything.

  Our fishing boat, the Immaculata, was propped up on barrels beside the shed where we stored the lobster traps in winter. It was a big boat, thirty-eight feet long with an imposing cab, an open workspace from cab to transom. A Northumberland with flowing lines.

  –So, what’s with the Immaculata?

  –We fish for lobsters every spring. My mother is religious. Believes a name like that will keep us safe.

  –You can drive that thing?

  –I can.

  –Impressive.

  –It’s pretty simple. It’s like a wheelbarrow. Steers from the rear. You turn right by swinging the arse-end left.

  –Aha. Diesel engine?

  –Hundred and thirty-five horsepower Ford. Cheap to run. You know diesels?

  –I know trucks. My dad owns a bunch of them. I’ll be driving one this summer. So, what did your dad die of?

  –A stroke, I guess.

  –You don’t know?

  –Don’t know for sure. He went to town one day. Never came home. Just dropped.

  –I often wonder how I’d react if my old man popped off like that.

  He snapped his fingers.

  –What do you think, Byron?

  –I think it’s different for everybody.

  –Where did it happen? The accident. When your mother…

  –Over there. There used to be a barn.

  –Where did the barn go?

  –It burned down, not long after.

  –So, she ran over you, your mom, where there used to be a barn.

  –Right.

  –Ran over you with what? You’ve never said.

  –A snowmobile.

  –A what?

  –A Ski-Doo. Okay?

  –Like. How?

  –Like, she just did.

  –And the barn burned down, just like that?

  –We don’t talk about it.

  –I hear you.

  We walked around the boat. There was still hard, crusty snow beneath the keel and the hull was marked and battered where the traps come bumping up out of the water over the side.

  –So you and your mom go out together, fishing on that thing?

  –We do.

  –Cool, he said.

  –There’s a lot of work every spring, just getting it ready for the water. Scraping and painting. Repairing traps. We’ll be at that soon.

  –Just you and your mom.

  –Just us.

  –No shit.

  * * *

  —

  Allan set me up with my first “educational” drug experience, as he called it. The beginning of the road to dissipation, I told him. Luckily for me, it was a short road. I’d had enough of drugs. In my case, painkillers, but they’re all the same. He said he understood. Whatever turns you on or off, he said. It was just a few weeks after we’d first met, just past the end of the football season.

  I think by then Allan had tried them all—pot, coke, meth, LSD, et cetera. He later claimed he once drove a truck all the way from Toronto to Florida stoned on acid. Just experimenting, he assured me.

  There had been a fall field trip for the geologists to another country place not far from town and someone in the group discovered mushrooms, the magic kind, growing wild in a farmer’s field. The geologist, who was also a football player, kept quiet about it, and one night shortly afterwards Allan went along with him to harvest those mushrooms.

  I had qualms. With the drugs I knew, anxiety always cancelled out euphoria. I tried the mushroom. Didn’t like it.

  –Mushrooms just make me hungry, I told Allan. Make me think of meat. Big, thick, juicy slabs of red meat.

  –So what’s not to like? he asked, frowning.

  –I like to keep my wits about me.

  –Exactly. That’s where drugs come in.

  –Knock yourself out, I said.

  * * *

  —

  I’ve seen photos of myself before my accident. Happy little face, squinting in the sunshine, a mop of curls. A chubby little torso on two sturdy legs. Mom and Dad looked happy then.

  I struggle not to think about all that.

  I didn’t know the Winter sisters before high school. I didn’t really know anybody before high school. After my accident, my parents decided that the world was much too dangerous for me. Even if they had wanted me to go to school, for a long time I spent part of every year in hospitals and rehab. My formal education, such as it was, happened mostly in a hospital or at our kitchen table on the farm.

  By the time I got to high school, I was more than ready for the formal academic challenges. But I wasn’t ready for the social part of normal life. I had no friends. I had never really spoken to a girl.

  I might have seen the sisters on the street in town or at the mall when my mother and I went shopping. I’m sure they’d have noticed me, given I was either on crutches or in a brace or wearing the big shoe. But I had no specific
memory of them.

  I’d heard the name, Winter. Their dad was in real estate. You’d see his face on roadside signs. Their mom was politically active. But to us country people, the Winters were from another planet, another species.

  They seemed so much older than I was, Peggy and her sister, even though we were about the same age. Looking back, all girls seemed wiser and more sophisticated than I was. Even the little ones. To me, the female world was little girls and older women, every one of them a mystery.

  The Winter sisters and I ended up in the same English class. It was when we started studying the early nineteenth-century poets, their works and their interesting lives, that Peggy started with the Byron.

  She would seek me out on breaks. We’d stroll around the schoolgrounds, or the streets around the school, and we’d talk. She acted like I was just another girlfriend. Though I noticed that, except for her sister, Annie, Peggy didn’t seem to have a lot of girlfriends. I think she intimidated other girls. I know that at first she intimidated me.

  Then I decided that, way down deep, we were just the same. She was just like me. Or maybe I was like her. Whatever. And it was around then that I started having complicated feelings for Peggy Winter, first the scary things you feel when you like and trust someone a lot but don’t know very much about them. Then the longing started—deep and unfamiliar and, I soon realized, unwelcome.

  I had expected harassment from the boys, because of all the time I spent with Peggy Winter. Jealousy, perhaps, maybe even bullying, but it never happened. I now owned my father’s truck and that alone was status. Everybody seemed to know I drove a fishing boat. Maybe I was lame, but at seventeen I had the shoulders and the biceps and the hands of a lobster fisherman. Which also might have helped.

  And then, when we moved on to university, the chemistry between me and Peggy Winter became diluted in a way. I was immersed in studies. She made new friends, found a new social circuit. Strangely, it would be Allan Chase who brought us back together.

  * * *

  —

  Allan seemed fascinated by our boat and persuaded me to take him out at some point that October. It was still football season. The team was doing well, to a large degree because of him. There was lots of admiring talk about the lethal linebacker from Toronto. The day was calm and sunny, but it was cold out on the water. His eyes were runny from the breeze.