He could hear her wheeze a little now. She had to go everywhere with a portable oxygen tank. Emphysema. He wanted to ask her, again, the question that had dominated his thoughts for thirty years. Three years after the NHL scouts stopped tailing him from rink to rink, Leonard had gone to community college for two semesters. His professor, in the first class of an introductory philosophy course, had asked what was the greatest question that humanity faced? A young woman answered, “What is the purpose of life?” The rest of the whiteboard was blank space but for that question his professor wrote in its centre. For Leonard there was one greater and he’d asked it of his mother whether he was drunk, high or sober — after dad died, why didn’t you know what was going on?
“Roger is coming home for Christmas,” she said. “He’s bringing Willa and the girls.”
His older brother, his wife and kids. Their father had died and Roger went into cadets and Leonard went to the Rectory. Nothing could touch Roger. He came out of Somalia, out of the disgraced Canadian Airborne Regiment without so much as a blemish. He was in JTF2 now, Afghanistan and then Libya. Maybe Syria. When he had come back to the reserve three Christmases ago, they had sat on his mother’s couch and Leonard had asked him about his missions. Roger screwed up his face as if he was struggling to remember a question on Jeopardy. “There was gunfire, I remember that. Tracers. Singed hair maybe. Drink up, baby brother. It helps.”
A gull screeched somewhere above the Thunderbird. “Yeah, I got the mushroom soup,” Leonard murmured.
“I said Roger is coming, Leonard. He was promoted to warrant officer. Leonard?”
He’d left the present again. It was the second Sunday of Advent 1978, in Scanlon’s private room. There was candlelight and mumbled prayers. The claws of Scanlon’s dental plate. A caress.
Leonard went back to Scanlon’s room two days later, in the evening, when the old man was likely to be tired and forgetful. There was a different nurse on duty at the desk and she said that Scanlon had had a quiet day. “Visiting hours finish in twenty minutes,” she said.
Scanlon lay in the same position as he had on the first day, except now he wore a blue checked robe over his pajamas. His eyes were closed. The only light came from the cold, blue fluorescent one above the headboard of his bed.
Leonard had wrapped the razor blade in a piece of paper he’d torn off the road map of British Columbia, so he wouldn’t cut his fingers when he found the blade in his coat pocket. He edged over to Scanlon’s night table. The muscles of the old man’s jaws had gone slack and his breaths came and went in a slow, peaceful rhythm. There would come a day when his forgetfulness ran so deep, he’d forget to breathe. Leonard couldn’t wait until then. His fingers felt slippery and damp on the handle of the night table drawer. He didn’t need to worry about fingerprints, because he’d already opened the drawer for Scanlon the other day. It was a paranoid thought — no one cared, no one would arrest him. The drawer stuck, about half way open and Leonard had to crouch down and, with both hands on either side of it, wiggle it back and forth, until it was open enough that he could slip his hand inside and grab Scanlon’s notebook.
Scanlon coughed. His eyes flashed open and closed again.
Leonard lay the notebook on the nightstand, opened it to the entry for March 12th, 1994 and unwrapped the razor blade. He held his right hand with his left, so the cut would be straight. He should’ve had a drink to steady himself. He should’ve eaten something, but he couldn’t keep anything down but water with a little of the Real Lemon he’d bought for his mother. He sliced as close to the binding as he could and when he reached the bottom of the page he went back and cut the little jagged edges of the page that still clung to the binding. The entry for March 12th didn’t continue onto the next page and the previous entry for March 9th, didn’t continue on to the page he’d just cut out for March 12th. He held the book up towards the light to make sure his cut hadn’t scarred the page beneath it. No. Nothing, but a little bead of blood on the tip of his index finger, which he daubed on the sleeve of his dark jacket. He wrapped the razor blade in the page from the journal and stuffed it in his pocket and placed the journal back in the drawer as he’d found it.
2 Comments
Powerful stuff! A thoughtful perspective on a challenging topic.
Really love this story! It took me back to the Catholic school I went to as a kid, the priest there… oh man!