Tarceva 150 mg
Morphine Sulphate 5 mg
WHAT THEY DID
ONCE, NEAR THE end—and ignoring her oncologist’s warnings—Liam and Willow get drunk on chardonnay in her Westfalia, in an ancient forest in the middle of a shining city of glass and steel. To mark the occasion, Liam digs his fingers into the slit in the driver’s seat, pulls out her secret bottle of Chanel No. 5, and spritzes the van.
“Not too much,” Willow says, before she closes her eyes and draws the citrusy scent deep into her tumour-constricted lungs.
The perfume seems to perk her up, however, and they sit drinking and chatting into the evening: about his work in Brooklyn (he leaves out the meeting-room tables he’s done for Holtcorp, Shell, and Weyerhaeuser), and about the various environmental causes that she’s still managing to champion, even in her diminished state.
“I don’t suppose you’re in the market for a Westfallia?” she says with a thin smile, after she grows tired and he’s lifting her impossibly light body up into the rooftop tent.
Liam shakes his head. “Actually, I hate this thing.”
She laughs softly, though he can tell the remark wounds her. “I know you think I’ve been selfish in my life,” she says, as Liam wraps her in three quilts. “But I made a choice just after you were born. A choice to take the difficult path. I wanted to give you a different kind of upbringing, a real one, not like the one I had.”
“My upbringing was great, Willow. But it was different, all right,” he says, snapping off the flashlight. “Mission accomplished.”
She closes her eyes and takes a long painful breath. “I was trying to teach you something.”
“What’s that?”
“To look upon Nature with reverence.”
What is Nature, exactly, Willow? he wants to ask. Is one of my reclaimed wood tables Nature? How about me, am I Nature? How come you never looked upon me with any reverence? How come trees are the only part of Nature that you ever cared about?
Instead he kisses her forehead and says, “I try to look upon everything with reverence, Willow. And it was you who taught me that.”
“You know,” she says, “sometimes I’ve looked at the things you’ve made, on the computer at the library.”
Liam can’t believe his ears. “Remember when I first got my carpentry ticket, and you called me a ‘certified forest killer’?”
“I never loved the idea of you wasting defenseless trees,” she says, shaking her head. “But this reclaimed work you do makes sense to me. You’ve made some truly wondrous things, Liam. So yes, you do look upon things with reverence, and it makes me proud.”
He sits up for hours in the van beneath her bunk, finishing the wine while listening to her cough—a low, grinding churn that comes on like a thunderstorm and leaves her gasping. He regrets that he can’t offer her a morphine pill after she’s been drinking—lately morphine seems to be the only thing that can keep the cough from waking her. Though he’d rather handle the morphine as little as possible, especially while he’s drunk.
The drunker he gets, the clearer it becomes to him that his mother has lived her life fleeing a brokenness, one passed down to her by the broken people who came before her, and that she’s passed some of this same brokenness down to him, like coals pulled from one fire and used to start another. And that he would do the same to his own child, if he ever had one.
“Can you promise me one thing?” she says later, her breath coming in gulping, tortured gasps. “That you’ll visit Everett, if you can. I worry about him out there all on his own.”
After Liam makes his promise, he sits vigil while she coughs and rants incoherently in a half-somnolent state—sending free-associative dispatches from inside the chemical swamp of cancer medication and booze and weed that floods her brain. It’s all nonsense to Liam, just more of her New Age philosophy and conspiratorial ranting, until suddenly, sometime near dawn, just as he’s dozing off himself, her burning green eyes appear above him in the entrance to the rooftop tent. “People can save you, Liam,” she says with startling clarity. “Always remember that. They do it all the time. Except it’s usually in ways we’ll never understand. But that doesn’t change what they did.”
The next morning, when Liam returns from the co-op and the pharmacy with their supplies, he discovers his mother’s body stretched out up there in the tent, her long grey hair tied back with a thin bough of cedar. A tree-swirled breeze sweeps crosswise through the mesh screens of the walls. A quiet green caress, passing her from one forest she’d loved to another.
Liam sits for a long time in the driver’s seat of his mother’s van, watching the trees, wondering if they can somehow perceive what they’ve just lost.
YOU’RE STILL HERE
HOURS SLIP BY in the sunken living room. Another night comes, spilling its shadows across the concrete floor. Then a new day replaces it. Liam watches the yolky sun seep in and then drain out again as though someone pulled a plug.
When a roaring thirst comes upon him, he opens the last of the Red Bulls that he brought back from the van. The taste is chemically comforting, like it’s the pure distillation of all those coveted unnatural products that Willow denied him as a boy. The bombardment of sugar and caffeine restores his senses enough for him to know that with his last Red Bull now gone, he hasn’t much longer to wait.
He recalls how Everett’s life had likewise devolved into a waiting game after Temple’s death. He drank steadily, though not as pitifully as he had in the weeks after she died. Liam honoured his promise to Willow and visited him intermittently over the years. Because upstate New York is full of broken-down structures perfect for his purposes, Liam never actually needed to go all the way to Saskatchewan for reclaimed wood; but it was a good excuse. He’d pay his great-uncle a small amount for carting away his fence boards, and though he’d never say it, Everett seemed to appreciate the company.
The last time Liam visits, he pulls up at eleven in the morning to find his great-uncle on the porch, where he sits in all seasons except the brutal prairie winter, with a pair of bifocals on the tip of his nose, a book in his lap, and a bottle of rye beside him like a trusted dog.
“You’re still here,” Liam says as he walks up to the house.
Everett glances around with eyes as cloudy as milk, as though confirming the fact for himself. “Seems like it.”
“I thought you hated this place,” Liam says, removing his baseball cap and joining Everett on the bench.
“Oh, I do,” says Everett, who still smells of linseed oil and sharpened chisels. “Except I’m too old to go anywhere else.”
“Well, I always liked it here. It was a good place for me to come as a kid.”
“I plan on leaving it to your mother,” Everett says, and Liam has to stifle a cough. After witnessing what Temple’s death had done to Everett, Liam doesn’t have the heart to tell him about Willow. “So I guess it will come to you, eventually. Can’t say the land is worth much, though. Don’t tell Temple, but this ground was never good for growing anything in the first place. You want a drink?”