There’s a stretch to her voice, a strain. That awful gravity, weighted on her back.

“He’s leaving. He might be leaving. He doesn’t know. That’s why it’s not working, right? Him not knowing?” Planative, echoing, her voice reaches across the phone.

Please don’t judge me.

There’s no reason, no rhyme to what she’s saying. I have no place to judge,my marriage recently collapsing around me like a deck of cards I randomly held up like stars, delicate on the tips of my fingers.

“Are we being recorded? I..I just need someone to talk to.” the crackle isn’t in the line. She’s a wall, a force, and yet you can hear the bend, the crumble in her mortar.

“oh, it’s recorded? I won’t then, I can’t…” I reach my hands out to support her, over the line, over kilometres,  language and culture. Tears can be silent messengers.

I ask her to tell me anyway.

“I’m blessed, my daughter, she’s 16 months, I have a fantastic sitter, my daughter just loves her and reaches for her. My parents will take me in.”

Underneath, the raw skin of a scar. The unknown, the fear, the mortification of a marriage that just won’t work.

“I haven’t told my parents yet.”

tell me it will be ok. tell me I will be loved again. tell me my daughter will never know the difference.

Normally I’d hear his footprints. The heavy mark of his breathing, staring at the screen,  the clatter of dishes in the sink at 3 am before he trudged up the stairs.

The oppression of his silence. The accusation in his eyes, as if his unhappiness lay only at my feet, like a warm mound of yeast, growing in the darkness. His finger-pointing.

The noise from these things, it’s built up behind us, slowly at first, then quickly, until it was deafening, filling the house, the corners, the nooks and the cracks with heated words and all the sad ends of who we once were.

And now it’s gone. He’s taken his books, his pictures from the wall. His favorite cereal from the cupboard. I don’t have to buy that soap anymore. But it echoes, the places he isn’t, all the ghosts that hold him still next to me.

The bed is cold. My hand reaches behind me, to the slightly sunken space that once held him, where once we laughed and dreamed and moaned our weaknesses out to each other. Where we made a baby, where we lost it. Where he once told me he loved me, every night.

I miss those words. I miss his warm breath on my neck, like snow falling on my eyelashes.

I turn the news down, almost too low, to where it might be snores or muttered dreams.

Cradle me Channel 7. Help me drown out his echo.

It rings but I don’t dare. It doesn’t ring and he comes home and asks me why don’t you answer? I call and I call and you don’t answer!

I try to explain, I stumble over the words I can’t find, stumble to replace the stuttering fear in my mouth with a concept he might be able to understand, pictures I could place into his hands.

He sighs from across the room, raises his eyebrows at me like a child. His face contorts into a mask only slightly resembling the man I know, and I feel my body shrink back into the sofa until he relents and leaves the room.

I tell them to cut the phone off, but he calls and tells them not to. Or someone else calls and tells them not to, but it’s not safe for them to call me. I have to wait. Until I’m at work, or passing by one of the increasingly rare pay phones in the city, clustered in small corners of dirty malls. They can’t hear me on those phones. The hissing isn’t there. The hidden sigh of a voice barely heard-I’m safe from that at work. I’m safe.

But he just shakes his head and stalks off, picking up the phone even as I scramble and yell NOOO! at him, my nails ripping his skin like daggers as he curses and tries to shake me off. They are listening! I tell him. They are there! How else would they have known I was going to wear those pants with THOSE shoes the other day, when they tried to warn me that my vanity would be my downfall. Remember! I nearly broke my leg that night, the heel of my sandal caught in a crack in time. Remember!

I fall against the counter as he pushes me away, almost negligent, carelessly. His eyes are full of disgust as he cradles his hand to him and dials a number. His mother! he says but I know better. He’s calling them.

I must escape to call, someone, anyone. Someone needs to know. They’re listening on that line, all the time. They’re waiting for me, and you can’t help me.

Her mother had given them to her when she married, as her grandmother had gifted them at the marriage of her parents. Twin sapphires, surrounded by tiny pinprick diamonds, on bands of slim white gold. Memory, heirloom, wishes. Years absorbed into metal.

She stared at me through milky eyes, and tucked them into my hand. I could hear them as much as feel them, the thin metal clink in my palm, the coolness of the stones.

“I should have given these to you earlier,” she said softly, as she tried to tug at my hand, despite the arthritis which had crippled her for years. “I thought, somehow, that being married was more meaningful. That finding a “him” would be right for you.” she pulled back slightly “But you married a life. You married a job, a calling, and have healed. You are married.” softly she smiled as she pulled away.

“They’re yours now. As they should have been, years ago. I’ve kept them too long.” she patted my hand, smoothed her hair back, still a vibrant brown. “They’re yours.”

They’re mine, and I have no one to give them to. My name dies with me. No nieces, no siblings, no cousins. When I die, where will the rings disappear to?

Through the clouds in her eyes I could see all the things she’d never tell me. “More tea Mum?”

I buried her yesterday. Today, I deal with the minutiae of her life. The common threads. For the last 5 years, she’s been in a small room in a well-kept facility, a good one. Friends work there, women I trained. Nurses I trust.

I spent my life healing, and yet I could not keep my mother home. Years of helping her eat, cleaning her in the bathroom, dressing her when her hands gave way to the pain. Years of a mother child merging in my head until I just couldn’t do it any longer, and the wind gave way from my lungs. And I left her there, in that place. In a room smaller than her own bedroom, in the house that’s now mine.

Her name is everywhere, and I don’t know what I’ll do without her. She’s always been here, she’s always been with me, in this house, on my hand, behind me, a mouse or a memory. And now she’s gone and I’m left holding the pages with her name on it and wondering what I do now.

How could I do it? How could I not take care of my mother? How was I not there when she passed? How could I have been there for so many, and not my own?

And what do I do now?

He tells me stories in his 3 bedroom, 1.5 bath apartment with the wrought iron balcony, the one that looks out on the greens with 26 trees, all spaced perfectly in a calming half circle. In the summer he tells me, he likes to find the middle and stand between, when his legs are good and the sun that warm milk blanket around him. He tells me about the summer of 1946, when he married his first wife in Italy, and the air was sweet with the sounds of summer embracing itself. They threw rice in the air he said and flowers and wheat and kisses, fertility and love for the smartly dressed boy from the Scottish Air Force and his tiny, shy bride. He won’t tell me about the war, other than to remind me half the boys never got to meet their brides before their maker.

They moved to Canada 10 years later, settled, but year after year were asked about that accent, what is it? not rudely but oddly, accents weaving in and out of the air of the major cities in those years after the war. My Canadian accent isn’t too good he’d joke and startle them before the laughter started. He loves this joke, and I can’t help but laugh too, even after he’s told it 15 times, his memory scraped clean from all the years he tries to count.

She died he tells me simply of his first bride, his reward for 5 years of war, rosebud lips and black hair. The cancer came for her and in their 50′s, the prime of their lives, the golden years, she was gone, leaving him alone. His lips draw shut as he talks about this, 28 years of marriage, no children, or none he’ll speak of, maybe lost to the wind, or now with their mother again, somewhere. He won’t tell me how long it took her to die.

But wife number two, his wee lass, the cancer found her too, and it took 3 long years to die, propped up in a hospital bed as the cancer ate away her brain. She’d call me up he says and scream that they had her in chains, ask me to call the police. The cancer he’d whistle softly. The cancer. His eyes would grow distant and I always wondered, did he believe he brought it to them? That he survived the hell of war only to poison his two loves?

Sometimes we’d both grow quiet, and I’d get to thinking and tell him 50 years of marriage between the two-Archie what a fine husband you must have been, how lucky these women were to have you and his eyes would fill with tears and silent gratitude before he’d get to making me laugh yet again.

No one ever visits him. Just me, as part of the palliative care, or his one friend for a weekly game of rummy. The only family to speak of were the ones too far to visit. The ones near to him abandoned him when he decided to leave his wordly goods to the hospital that cradled his wife as she lay crazed and dying. Archie has no one, but that in his memory. He’s drawn to talk like a thirsty man to water. I hear him on the phone with the phone company, the cable, just talking. Somedays they humour him, and he smiles and I can see that brash young man, kissing his new wife long and hard as the sun sets on Italian hills.

Sometimes they hang up on him, and I can tell hours later by the wounded look to him.

He’s dying, and he knows. He returns each month from the scans, silent as I wait for him, the only old man with no friends or family to hold him. They tell him that money isn’t the issue, or gratitude. The body can only take so much. Enjoy the sunny days Archie. We can’t promise how many you have left.

He sits by the window that looks out on to the balcony each day, the TV on as noise, pictures on his wall of the lives he’s lived, the places he’s seen.

The sun comes through those trees every morning, and he waits for it. He tells me the day he’s ready to die, he will wait for it each morning, in the grass, cross-legged, just like his first honeymoon finally taken by a waterfall. He was happy in those trees, in the sun he says. He’d like to feel it as he passes.

Drink your water Archie I tell him Summer will be here soon.

“Maria”

“Maria”

I fan through the pack of mail on the key table, a thick pile, all addressed to her. She won’t open them. She’s not here to open them, but that’s besides the point. If she were, if they were in her hands, she’d leave them here until I would open them, remind her the money was there, please pay them.

But she’s not here. She opened the door two days before Christmas and never looked back, the boys and I shocked and shivered in the doorway, their eyes looking for answers, my hands bare and splayed before me as she opened the door to a car I’d never seen before and sped into the snow.

Come January we still hadn’t opened the presents, the Visa bill come and gone. The boys cell phones don’t work anymore, cause she hasn’t paid the bill, and I only just found it, buried under a pile of clothes in the front hall. I can sift through the piles, the bills, the clothes, but all I see is her. Laughing eyes, the shock of blonde white hair at her collar, the red of her favorite sweater. I smell her on the air still, the perfume of her skin, tight like a symphony across the breeze.

I adored her.

I didn’t see any of this coming, didn’t anticipate. We were happy? I thought we were-she took care of the house, the boys, the money, I trudged out the door everyday at 6 to bring home a house and dinner and a nice life. I told her she was beautiful everyday, that I loved her. But somehow she ends up in, of all people, the arms of our minister, the man she told me was “guiding her” through midlife.

I’d like to guide him.

I need to change the names on everything. It’s all under her-I trusted it all to her. I can’t reach her, she never calls, not even for her sons, she’s just run off like we don’t exist and I can’t do anything since she’s the only one listed and “we’re just following procedure.”

Bills I can’t change, for a house she doesn’t live in anymore.

One place said they’d help me out, in the circumstance. For my father, who has a few months left to live, who just wants to watch his bloody hockey games. They cut him off after I didn’t pay-how was I to know? and I’ve spent the week getting a dying man’s cable back up. But they did it, after I played my hand and broke down, the tale of woe spilling from my mouth without my notice.

That happens a lot lately.

But everywhere I go-the same story. Someone hurt us. We hurt someone. You just can’t trust a person anymore. No one is safe.

I wasn’t perfect. Who is? But do we expect perfection now? Do we forget our own frailties, forget we’re imperfect creatures who bleed? Did she forget I did have a heart? Does she even have one? How do you abandon your children? How do you leave a life?

I’ve never cooked, beyond a pizza. I don’t know what to do with the carpet, and the boys won’t talk to me, figuring I’ve driven her off.

I don’t dare tell them the truth of it. I don’t dare.