Visuals by Ennie Skurczak
If she was going to be honest with herself, Meredith Comber had wanted to quit for ten years. Ten years she’d known the Endicotts as their gardener; as their friend, for thirty. She helped Margaret plant a bed of petunias for her baby shower, and on Wednesdays she drove Walter to the Legion when he was hypertensive and needed to unwind by talking. So it went for ten long years, and she hadn’t minded. But that morning it was August. The wretched anniversary.
A blanket of baked air hung over the lake like a fever, and the sails in the harbour hung limp. She often told herself she liked the lake, and maybe believed it. On Thorncrest, by the shore, it was well enough to believe, because the lake was all that greeted you when you opened your front door. If you told yourself something like you truly meant it, she believed, it had to count. So she liked the lake as well as one could conceivably like it. She liked the lake. Perhaps she even loved it.
That was why, as she sat in a wicker chair on her patio with a small breakfast, margarine-covered bread crusts and a cup of steaming tea on a coffee table; that morning when she sat, eyeing the lake and trying to love it, as she felt gentle beads of sweat pool on her forehead, and the brush of the damp air on her skin, she made up her mind to quit.
She would walk to the Endicott’s’ and do it. She had to go on long walks when the subject came up, or when she saw someone from the Legion, or when she failed to cast her eyes down and away from the old portrait Margaret had told her to take down countless times. It was this portrait that watched her as she dressed for the day, draping herself in a light grey jacket that Margaret had given her. Meredith remembered to ask about it when she saw her. She wanted to keep it light, so they wouldn’t worry. The portrait watched her gather her things in her bag: a pack of travel tissues she’d empty by the end of the day, a pillbox, five dollar bills in a clip, and a faded notebook. It watched her straighten the naval cap that rested on the mantel, along with an antique compass and a souvenir mug. The portrait hung over the mantel, and it looked so much like him, the old oarsman, with eyes like the gallop of wild horses, and a gaze as calm as the sea.
They’d bought the house after Walter badgered him enough at the pier, so that he’d either move into the neighbourhood or never get another peaceful day of fishing in his life. He worked on the house often, mending a leak in the furnace or re-tiling the roof. He kept clean. Once, he fought Walter over a push mower the two men had found during a garage sale, and he kept it in the shed, for a while. Only when she asked about it did he share with her his fear of slipping a disc or tearing a ligament. If there was one thing he could not forgive himself for it was the pain he feared to feel.
In 1985, she was still making money as a typist, and he’d been grappling with living on pension. She never understood his pride. He treated it like a life sentence, and there were certainly some parts of settling down that constricted him: the threat of chronic pain, reliance on prescriptions, aging. But he had never aged out of his warm smile and his humour, and she was always thankful for that.
They walked to the pier at six-thirty every evening and returned home just as it began to get dark. And they went sailing every weekend on a dinghy just as beat-up as he was, and stayed out under the stars, faded and grey in the setting sunlight. He’d bring loaves of fresh bread from the farmer’s market, a wedge of cheese, or sour cream and thick slices of onion, and a checkered picnic basket lined with cotton for iced wine and paper plates.
“You know,” she remembered him saying, “if you weren’t so happy here, I think I’d hate it.”
One afternoon she’d returned from buying groceries and found him sprawled on the curb, his hand kneading over his heart and him crying out, crying out like a child. She called for Walter, and ran to the back of the house, where she found the shed unlocked. The push mower lay at the other end of their backyard, lying in the grass, and as the two images met in her mind she had a premonition of the next year of medical bills.
He slept at Walt’s that night in a spare bedroom, stocked with plenty of ice and Benadryl. But she stayed up, pacing at the kitchen counter, the cord of the landline dangling limply on her index finger.
Over the short white fence Meredith saw Margaret struggle with the push mower. Her hands were liver-spotted and they shook as she pushed and behind her lay barely a patch of cut grass. She hadn’t seen Meredith yet. She had only just cleared the bend and caught the green smell of grass. But Meredith could see Margaret clearly in the bright light of the morning; her and the cottage, looming just out of view. A carved footpath led from the road to a well beside the house, where leagues of vines crept up from the wet darkness. Meredith tried not to look at it for too long as she approached the fence and, clearing her throat, gave one of the wooden posts a few short, sharp knocks.
Margaret hadn’t seemed to hear her. “Dirty gulls,” she muttered.
“Margaret?”
“Dunno why I ever fed those infernal creatures…can’t be left alone with anything…just make a fuss and sail off…”
“Maggie?” Meredith cleared her throat again. “It’s me.”
She turned and saw her, and with a Herculean effort tried to make it look as if she’d been thinking quietly all the time.
“Oh, Merry? Where’ve you been? It’s almost lunchtime!”
Meredith loved Margaret when she put on her air of worn sophistication. Truthfully, it did not suit her even a little. But after buying such an impressive house by the water, Margaret seemed to think it was her duty to grow into it, preening like a grey-haired hen.
“Just sitting on the patio, is all.” Then she remembered, and held the collar of her jacket up.
“Maggie, is it alright?”
“Truthfully?”
“Of course.”
“It’s…well. It looks well, as do you.”
“Does it?” Now that Margaret wasn’t bustling around the yard, Meredith could get a good look at her. Her grey hair was cropped shorter than she remembered, but her face hadn’t lost its look of perpetual concern for everyone around her. She was strong for her age, stocky and broad shouldered, and her hands, wrinkled as a cold sheet, held the mower’s handle firm and well.
“Sure.”
“Is Walt around?”
“I hope you aren’t asking if he’s kicked it,” she chuckled. “He’s down at the dock with some of the Legion people. Why?”
“Nothing important,” said Meredith. “I had hoped both of you would be here. I wanted to talk.”
“If it can wait,” she said sweetly, “we can chat over lunch. Walt put something in the crockpot this morning. I’ll make him serve it when he’s back.”
Meredith didn’t wait for an invitation to go inside. She passed Margaret, who did not mind. She shoved the mower forward onto a patch of dry sod, but the blades, dull and browning on the edges, stuck fast in a tangle of turf, and refused to go any further.
Last time she had been inside, they had held a block party, and Meredith was standing just outside a circle of men, who in turn were huddled around Walter. Like these other men, who had all been through it, Walter was dressed in a tweed jacket, a white pleated shirt and high waisted pants, and as he spoke he kept smoothing down his pleats, fiddling with his buttons. Gently he coaxed them all down to his messy basement office, where he passed around a torn, blackened scrap of fabric he insisted was a flag. According to him, he had plucked it off the first cruiser he worked on. He and a hundred others were sailing along the coast with a shipment of dried fruits and canned milk. He didn’t know where they were supposed to be bringing them—you never knew these things at the time, he said. Then he laughed as he recalled one dreary November evening, when, during a routine inspection, a set of container lashings got clipped, and an entire steel box of dried apricots toppled into the Atlantic. A complete waste, Walter laughed, and so did the others. Meredith was surprised to hear herself laughing, but she was not surprised to feel it coupled with the tightness in her chest.
Two hours passed, and it had begun to rain. Only lightly, and while the sky had turned a sour grey it was still bright, but all the same, one could hear the gentle pitter patter of rain falling on the rooftop, colliding with the window. Inside the house was warmly lit and quiet. The AC hummed from the depths of the furnace room, and Margaret had fiddled with the dials on an old radio until she had found a song she seemed to like. Then, as she had been talking about something funny Walt had said earlier that day, before he set out, Meredith found herself gently crying, and not wanting to at all.
She told Margaret about the purpose of her visit. The pack of tissues lay on Margaret’s dresser, half empty.
Margaret moved to a brown upholstered couch by Meredith’s side.
“If you wanted to quit,” Margaret said, “it would be alright with us. Only I worry about you, Merry. What will you do?”
“Sleep in more, I suppose.”
“You know what I mean. I want to make sure you’re spending time doing something,” Margaret said. “I don’t like the thought of you sitting around at home.”
“Neither do I,” said Meredith. “I just don’t think I can come out here everyday.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to see the lake.”
“The lake…” Margaret said, looking out the parlour window. “It’s been three hours. Walt should be back by now.”
“Was he feeling well this morning?” Meredith asked.
“I should hope that that has nothing to do with it.”
“Only asking.”
“His blood pressure was up. Do you know, I don’t remember whether I saw him take his medication.”
She paced, going to the window, and returning to the parlour. “Yes, he must have taken them, because he always takes them after he’s showered, and he took an awfully long shower. You don’t think he’s forgotten has he?”
“Well, he’s not that forgetful. But if you think he has—”
“No not at all.”
“Well, I’ll call the Legion anyway, to see if someone’s seen him.”
Walt called her one day, two months after the funeral. She remembered the quality of his voice over the receiver, how he spoke kindly to her, simply. It annoyed her at first, but she appreciated his thoughtfulness. He asked how she was. Well, she answered. That was good. He wanted to see if she could come round and help him with a project he’d been thinking of starting for ages. She said she’d be over as soon as she was able. She waited around the house for a half-hour or so, just so that she wouldn’t look like she had nothing to do.
At Walt’s, she was met with a dark brown square of earth bordered by splintered wooden planks. In a brown paper bag he had packets of seeds for gardenias and lilacs and wildflowers he couldn’t pronounce the name of. He strained on his hands and knees, opening up little pockets of air in the soil with his fingers. He asked for a hand.
She got to work right away. It was patience and discipline. She watered plants, fetched bags of fertilizer, hauling them to and from the shed, trimmed low-hanging branches. Shakily, patiently, she moulded the garden and extended it by tearing up the planks and making an outcropping of stones she found at the pier. Sometimes Margaret grew thyme and green peppers, but mostly it was decorative, blossoming flowers.
The last free job she did for them had her wobbling on a rickety ladder, shucking dead branches off a stubborn, grey tree with a pair of rusty shears. Leaves fell in great clumps as she worked, and though she had to take breaks, she eventually climbed down, stood back, and saw that the tree was completely tidied up. She was on the phone, asking for insecticide and orange safety netting, when she heard Margaret, upset with Walt. Asking their close friend for free labour was bad enough, she said, but after what had just happened to her…
For her part, though, Meredith was happy to be active. And so they hired her. And the next ten years unfurled like a grey sail.
He was on the water, one of Walt’s friends said. Had been for some time. Just floating there. She would check on him. The dinghy was out of use but not too old. The small boat rocked gently in the still water, but the wood was sturdy, and the ripples that floated across the pond were smooth. She threw in her bag and slid in after it.
The wind had still not picked up, so she was forced to use a set of oars that were lying in the hull. They were chipped, and rough to touch, but Meredith held them firm and with a long sigh she shoved the vessel out from the harbour.
She did not know how she felt, being out on the water. The boat bobbed and swayed underneath her but she kept herself steady. The surface of the water was clear, and a fine mist had settled over the lake.
In the distance, she could see Walt’s vessel, swaying with the low, gentle waves.
And she could just make out, jutting from the gentle curve of the faraway boat, the silhouette of Walter, slumped over at the stern.
But the sound of his snores drifted over as she pulled in close to the boat. His chest rose and fell steadily, and she was not worried. Far from it, she could only smile as the old man snored. The inside of the boat was mucky and wet, and Walt’s shoes were spattered with water. Quietly, without waking him, she attached a thin cord from her boat to his and slipped out.
Leaving her shoes behind, she hobbled onto Walt’s vessel. The stars were coming out, and they looked warm and grey in the fading sunlight. Taking off her socks and loafers, she dipped her toes into the water. And as she did, Meredith caught sight of a seagull’s white wing, clipping through the warm air. And she wished, at that moment, that she were a bird by the sea, sailing higher, higher, until her white down melted into the pallour of the clouds.
Parker Sherry is a writer and journalist from Montreal. They have published several articles during their time as an editor for Dawson College’s student newspaper, The Plant, and is currently pursuing a degree in creative writing. In love with local history, Parker aspires to continue their journalistic pursuits to learn more about their city and the vibrant people in it.