MICHAEL FOY

Until Someone is Named

Locals call it The Gale. During the day the white stuccoed building looks like an Italian villa, at night a turreted fortress, resting above the valley fog that floats down the Fraser. The Florence Nightingale is its official name, a private hospital that sits on a hillside in Bolivar Heights. They offer extended care—because there isn’t enough to go around.

And tonight, eighty-two-year-old Nora Allen has escaped.

“Checked her room twice,” says Maggie, “and the dining hall.”

“Main floor bathroom?” asks Joan.

“Empty,” Maggie’s voice says from a storage room behind the admissions desk. “My shoes, jacket, and car keys are gone.”

“She took advantage of shift change and took your car, that’s pretty crafty.”

“Whose side you on?”

Maggie brushes past Joan and points to her KIA.

“Thank God.”

The car alarm goes off, as though her finger point tripped it—headlights flash and the horn blasts in non-stop succession.

“She’s pressed the fob, so she’s in range. Call Terwott.”

Joan whistles low. “She’s gonna be pissed.”

“Yeah well, it’s 11:30, it’s dark, and it’s raining. Gimme your keys.”

“These ones,” Joan says, “I lock in the cabinet, so they don’t walk off.” Joan unhooks them and stops the rattling with a squeeze.

Maggie rolls her eyes, Joan’s such a stickler—follow the steps and check the boxes.

“The keys?” Maggie says, holding her flat palm out.

“Hold your horses,” Joan says, dropping into a chair behind the computer. “We’re here,” she drags the cursor across the screen to highlight the top of the missing patient response flow chart, “and you wanna move all the way down here?” She scrolls to full search of hospital grounds and surrounding neighborhood.

“It’s her birthday,” Maggie says, “I bet she’s off to that restaurant, no idea of the time. C’mon, Joanie, the keys. Longer you wait, further she gets.” Maggie knows Nora’s obsessions. The people she’s wronged, the ones she left behind, forgotten. And how Nora’s guilt coincided with a sharp cognitive decline, forgetting names for common objects, like a toothbrush and the TV remote. “Where am I? Why am I here?” Became daily questions. Emotionally undone, with crying fits and random laugher and a focus on the bad things done. All of it, documented in Nora’s patient report. Maggie feels responsible for her escape, by telling her to fix it, find out what happened. It’s never too late to do what’s right.

“Passenger window doesn’t work,” Joan says, tossing the keys, a perfect arc into Maggie’s hand. “If you roll it down, I can’t get it up without taking the door apart.”

Rain splatters the entrance window; the wind pushes the doors open and Joan and Maggie look up from the admissions desk after they bang shut.

“Is it a rally?” Joan asks. “You know, one last push. She couldn’t even get out of bed yesterday.”

“A rally for who—”

“For whom—”

“Fuck Joan. She doesn’t have any one left. Remember her sister, Ada. That look. Like she’d dropped off a sack of clothes at the Goodwill.” Maggie knows abandonment, she was adopted as a child, placed with a family in B.C. 's interior and raised on a mushroom farm. Joan knows there’s no talking to Maggie when she’s like this, it’s full-on saviour mode, stand back.

Maggie lifts Joan’s jacket from the chair back, “I need this,” punching the arm holes, “it’s pouring out there.”

“You better do something about that car alarm.”

“It’ll die. Eventually.”

***

Nora is craving a Big Mac, large fries and maybe one of those apple pies, if they still make them. Her stomach void and closing in on itself. At the Gale, the food alone can drive most away. The stolen green Crocs have MAGS spelled out on the toes in black letter rivets. Gravel embedded in the heel’s foam scrapes the asphalt when she walks. Ksssht… Ksssht… Ksssht . The sound means Nora’s heading somewhere, and so does the pain in her hip. Bone on bone. She stops to rub it, “Get me up that hill.” She laughs out breath clouds…they drift up. A muscle spasm straightens her leg and scrunches her face. The laughing stops. The Vicodin is wearing off. Nora digs into the coat pocket of the yellow rain jacket and finds a stick of double mint, a couple pills and a bobby pin. She pops the pills, crunching them to powder and swallows them like a food source. “Maggie comes through in a pinch.” She unwraps the gum and folds it into her mouth, sucking the winter green to cool her teeth. The leg tension fades. She pulls a twenty from the other pocket, rubbing the stiff plastic image of the Queen between her thumb and finger. Daniel, her second son, thought she looked like the Queen. She’s on the $1, $2, and $20, he had boasted to the other kindergarten kids on the first day of school. What bill’s your mom on?

Rain, lit up below the streetlights, streaks the dark. From where she stands it looks like it only falls under the halo, in that one spot, but it pecks Nora’s face. The wet. The rain. Nora has had it all for these eighty-two years and today she starts her eighty-third, outliving her second son Daniel, and her husband.

Her first son was adopted out the day he was born. She never gave him a name. Tilting her head, eyes closed, tongue out, she waits, but no drops land. Surrounded by water, Nora’s mouth is dry. Pulling the tan scrunchie she releases her long gray hair, slipping her hand through the strands, and tugging at the knots. I’m an old woman with old hair. Gathering it, she replaces the scrunchie, sliding the cool metal bobby pin into her scalp. She shivers. She pulls out Maggie’s key fob, points it toward the hospital, and presses the panic button. Twice.

She steps over a moss-covered crack in the sidewalk. An old one, filled with thick green fuzz, like a caterpillar. The moss distorts and softens the edges, making it less likely to be fixed. The fracture remains. Nora walks. She counts and recounts the number of holes in the toes of her crocs. It’s thirteen, always thirteen. “One, two, three, four…” There’s comfort on each count. Ksssht… Ksssht… Ksssht.

The Rickshaw’s red and blue neon sign flashes down the road: it shows a boy in a sun hat leaning forward, with a wooden shaft under each arm, pulling a woman in a carriage. His sandaled feet flicker, like he’s running. The back wheels flash, like they spin. The woman looks out from The Rickshaw. Her red dress encircles her, like a flower pointed in your direction.

“If the sign’s on,” Nora remembers, “they’re open.”

Moments of lucidity, the nurse called them, when the memories seep in. And along with them a sense of who Nora is. Where she’s been, what she’s lost, and who she’s loved. A restaurant talk with Daniel remains, alive, in her head. He sits at a table near the entrance as swirls of steam rise from plates of chicken fried rice and bright red sweet and sour pork. The waiter had asked, “Anything else?”

“A Coke,” Nora says now, “with lots of ice, and the soy sauce please?” She leaves the sidewalk, stepping onto the asphalt to cross. She feels the car’s headlights climb her face. The car swerves and honks, “Get the fuck off the road lady!”

Nora continues to a gravel trail on the shoulder. Life’s full of surprises, asshole. Her conversation with Daniel returns, “I didn’t plan it, you know, I was sixteen—think about that for a sec. Sixteen and in a home for unwed mothers. Lime green walls, with a single bed pushed up against a one-drawer nightstand and an upholstered chair with a cigarette burn on the seat cushion. Everything magnified by being alone. The furniture was whitewashed. It was like a witness protection program and my only crime was having a child out of wedlock. It may be hard to believe, but that was a big deal then. Ada dropped off a small suitcase with a broken buckle. My clothes were heaped at the front entrance. She didn’t stay to speak, even to ask if I was okay. My family wanted me wiped off the map.”

“Mom—”

“You think I caved? Well,” she said, picking up her fork and knife. “I fought, fuckin’ right, let me tell you. Abortion wasn’t legal—I could go to jail along with the doctor. What if I quit school, got a job? That place was run by the Salvation Army and anything done solely for me, selfish, so they pounded the drum, ‘adoption is brave, selfless, you are in the clear if you have faith in Christ’. The father was gone. No tracking him down. No internet, no email, no help me find the father of this child dot com. Like an army they kept pressing, I was surrounded. They wore me out. I believed them. They would deliver me.”

Daniel twirls a fork between his thumb and finger.

“You listening?” Nora asks.

“You’re not in front of a classroom anymore, Mom. How many chances did you have to tell it all? Instead, some stranger calls, saying we have a positive match on 23andMe and he thinks he’s my brother. I hung up. Can you believe it? I thought it was a scam. After me, he called Aunt Ada because her name was on the release documents. He must have had all the wrong answers because Aunt Ada wouldn’t give you up. She refused. Your other son’s out there.” He pointed at the door with his thumb. “Wandering the dark.”

Daniel shovelled in three spoonfuls of rice. Nora remembers the redness around his eyes, the clear liquid running from his nose, and his spoon striking the plate, clink, before hitting the floor.

“Don’t you wanna talk to him?”

Her eyes glazed over. Her lip corners dropped.

“And say what?”

Daniel stood, stepped on the spoon, and bent the handle before he left Nora alone at the Rickshaw. A memory came back. The squawk of her first born. His pink skin against her, the warm weight of him, like a cat curling up on your lap. A bundle so tiny and light. The crying only stopped when he began rooting for her breast.

When Daniel died, the desire to connect with her adopted son began when she woke and continued throughout the day. It found a way into her thoughts, and her daily conversations with Maggie.

She goes on, down the gravel trail. Ahead is a large black dog with tan patches on his shoulders like the highest military rank and thick meaty jowls drawn taut to show teeth. A protector, this is my path, get your own. Nora stops and looks for an owner, someone to call him off. A yell of, ‘oh he’s fine, all bark but no bite,’ instead this dog’s ready for a show down. With the threat comes a flood of fear and disorientation, followed by anger. “Get lost dog!” She screams. But the dog lowers his head and widens his stance.

Brake lights flash and a car pulls between her and the dog. A young woman winds her window down in a flurry, “Looks like you need a ride.”

“You got that right, dear.”

“Where ya headed?”

“Rickshaw.”

“Oh, that’s easy enough. I’m going up there for gas.”

“I may need a hand getting in.”

The young woman gets out and walks to the passenger side and gently grabs Nora under the arms, “That alright?”

“I’m used to being handled.”

Helping her in, she closes Nora’s door and gets back in the driver seat. The wipers swish.

***

Even at a distance, in the dark and the rain, Maggie spots her green crocs and the yellow rain jacket getting into the car. “Not bad Nora,” she thinks. “Further than last time.” The streetlights whip by, closing the distance between the two cars and between Nora and Maggie.

***

The young woman adjusts herself in the seat before clicking on the seatbelt. Now that she sees Nora up close, she recognizes her.

“Mrs. Allen, it’s me Sarah Diaz—I had you for physics at Enver Creek.”

“Anything’s possible, but I don’t remember much anymore.”

Sarah twists the wiper control arm to HI and looks at Nora.

***

“You taught Classical Physics. Reversibility, remember, the idea that theoretically everything runs the same backwards as forwards. The butterfly into the caterpillar and the old man into the child. You’re the reason I did physics at UBC.”

“Well dear,” she smiles, “you can’t blame me for that.”

“I can say this… I absolutely hated it. Lasted one semester. I’m a big picture kinda person and I couldn’t get there in physics.”

She clicks her turn signal, then checks for cars before getting back on the road.

“Aren’t we in a system right now?” Nora asks. “A finite one made of fundamental properties that act in predictable ways. How about the car, the road, and the accelerator? Throw in speed, distance and time and I can tell you with some certainty what will happen. When we will arrive, how fast we will be going and how much force it would take to stop everything dead in its tracks.”

Sarah looks in the rear view, “Well, if that’s not tailgating, not sure what is.” She pulls into the Rickshaw.

“Here we are.”

Sarah is about to get out when Nora places a hand on hers. “Things are added, and things are taken away.”

“I’m confused.”

“In life, dear.”

They pause and Sarah looks down at the wiper control arm, twisting it to intermittent. Sarah gets out.

When she does, Nora reaches over to lock the doors. Click. She slides a leg over the center console, “you can do this,” she thinks, “go slow,” and grabbing the steering wheel with both hands, brings her other foot over, careful not to bump her head on the rear-view mirror, she drops into the seat.

Sarah pulls on the passenger handle, knuckles the window, “What the hell are you doing?” Muted by the glass. “Have you lost your mind?”

Nora pokes on the radio, well, it’s alright, even when they say your wrong, well it’s alright sometimes you gotta be strong. She puts her foot on the brake and slides the shifter into D, when Maggie arrives at the driver’s door window, pounding it with the flat of her hand.

“Don’t you dare!” Thunk, thunk, thunk. “You’ve gone far enough!”

“Watch your toes, dear,” Nora gently steps on the gas. “I’m off to see the soil I grew up on,” she says to the windshield.

The gravel crunches beneath the tires as she rolls onto the King George. Traffic is quiet this time of night.

Nora collects her change, places the brown paper bag with the Big Mac and Fries on the passenger seat and the drink in the cup holder. What I wouldn’t do for a gin and tonic. She gets back onto the King George and a block so familiar. Her childhood haunt, she remembers when they widened the highway to four lanes. Progress, development, spaces taken—The Milk Jug, the Country Kitchen—gone. Replaced and built over—always up, higher, wider, bigger, brighter, and faster. The Sky Train. The traffic lights. The highway. Apartments and condos are everywhere the fields and pastures and forest used to be. Glitz and glam replacing soil and trees. The fun of those empty spaces is gone. She reaches over to pull out a tangle of fries, shoving them into her mouth. The crispy outer layer gives way to the fluffy inside. She chews, moans softly.

The car lurches, launching her food bag onto the floor. She turns the stiffening wheel and gets the car to the curb, it stalls, red light colors the dash and the power steering completely gives out.

Nora exhales, resting her head on the wheel and closing her eyes.

The adoptive parents entered the delivery room without knocking. They wore long felt overcoats that stretched below their knees. His was grey, hers beige. She stared at their puffy, sky-blue shoe covers, like little clouds around their feet, never meeting their eyes. She thought up a name and had it written it on a slip of paper, but they never asked.

“This is God’s baby,” they said.

Nora squeezes the wheel. The greasy lump of food in her stomach.

Thump, thump, thump. Again, it’s Maggie rapping the driver’s door. She motions for Nora to roll the window down.

“Party’s over.”

Maggie opens the car door and on goes the interior light.

“Nice shoes.”

They look at the Crocs.

“Comfy? Get in.” She points back at Joan’s car. “I’ll get your food.”

Once they buckle in, Nora asks Maggie to take her to Ada’s complex.

“No,” Maggie says shaking her head. She looks over at Nora. The redness in Nora’s cheeks has faded. The blood is gone. She continues south on the King George. Her cell phone rings.

“What the hell am I supposed to tell Terwott?”

“Nothing,” Nora says, “Don’t answer it.”

Nora holds her Big Mac and chews, savoring the Thousand Island dressing and the sesame seed bun, crunching out the last fry bits, salty and soaked with grease.

“You’ve got five minutes to talk to Ada.”

“Five minutes,” Nora echoes, lowering her window and the glass drops inside the door, clunk. “Oh. That didn’t sound good,” Nora says. “I only wanted to reach out for a handful of rain.”

Moist outside air whips into the car lifting the McDonald’s bag. Nora reaches for it and misses. The bag settles on the back seat.

They continue until they reach the high-rise.

Ada sold the family home. The three-acre parcel of land went to Sand and Associates, ‘we are where you want to live’ for seven figures. They built The Willow, a fifteen-story apartment complex, encircling the tree that once stood in front of her childhood home. The tree is like a massive head of unkempt hair, hanging over the eyes, waiting for someone to swipe it aside. She climbed it as a kid and threw black berries at the boys riding bikes below. That was when her life was weekends and mischief. The city passed a bylaw that prohibits the planting of willows. The root system runs too deep, constantly searching for water, penetrating foundations, drain systems, and even buckling driveways. They ruin so much staying alive.

Frameless panes of glass, and the bright light projecting from inside, make the high-rise look like a giant movie screen. Nora feels like she’s arrived at the drive-in. One after another the apartment doors are visible through the glass, stuck in an assembly line awaiting an addition, a colorful touch to set them apart. But it never happens. Every door’s the same, every floor the same, bookended with potted plastic trees, standing below a red exit sign.

Maggie and Nora are standing in the foyer staring at the video intercom. A glossy camera eye stares back. Maggie finds an Ada Park in the directory and presses the call button. A red light appears below the camera.

“My God Nora? Is that you?”

“Ada?”

“It’s one o’clock in the morning?”

Apologizing, Nora explains that she has come from the hospital to find out more about her adopted son.

“That was years ago.”

“There’s nothing you can tell me?”

Nora leans toward the camera.

“I do have a photo…somewhere. Hold on.”

Ada’s voice returns. “I’ll bring it down.”

Nora turns to Maggie who lifts her arms and lets them flop against her sides. They walk to the elevators and watch the hall lantern tick down 15-14-13…and stop on L. Out steps Ada in a floral dressing gown, holding out a framed photo. A young man in his mid-twenties stands with Ada next to a Denny’s restaurant sign. Taller than Ada, his blue jeans, rolled into a four-inch cuff, rest above sockless feet and tan suede shoes.

“No socks,” Nora says, “Chic.” dragging her finger down the frame.

Most of his bangs are tucked behind his ears, but a thick spear of hair sits on his cheek. He’s leaning back, mid laugh, carefree, in a body that continued to grow. Nora imagines him in a sort of fictional flip book moving from birth to his first steps, to feeding himself from a plastic bowl resting on the kitchen table, to riding his ten-speed. Images fly, the boy growing taller, dressing for Halloween, opening Christmas presents, and ice skating at the Newton Arena. Smiling and crying, red faced and mad, wanting to take the car to Cultus Lake for the weekend—denied. Sneaking out to drink beer behind Georges Vanier Elementary and being brought home by the cops with a bloody face. She wants to experience it all—somehow, someway. But she can’t.

“His name?”

“Oh Nora,” Ada says, “its’s been so long now, and it was the briefest of visits. I don’t remember.”

Nora gives the photo back to Ada, resting a hand on hers so they are both touching the photo.

“Harper,” Nora says. “I bet it was Harper James.”

“No,” Ada says, pulling her hand away. “That wasn’t it.”

“Well, it had to be something.”

Nora turns to look at the willow in front of the complex, with its lance shaped leaves, and remembers that from the crown she could see every house in the neighbourhood and hear all the other children’s voices. She stayed up there for hours, and no one ever knew where she was.

“Forget it, Nora.” Maggie places a hand on her shoulder and leaves it there, “time to go.”

Nora steps closer to the window, it’s quiet on the foyer carpet. She misses the sound of her Crocs on the asphalt, and black berry-stained hands.