The Girl in the Wall (7 page)

By the time she opened the heavy wooden door leading to the front hall the warm feeling inside her had faded but was not forgotten. Maybe it lives there now, she thought, and smiled, imagining it safe inside the many layers that made up her small body. Then she felt confused. There was her idea of getting smaller to ease her movements around the families of the dead — what she recognized as her desire to be invisible — but now that the warm feeling had come, she had an enormous longing to protect it with extra layers of her self. She didn't want it seeping out, going anywhere.

Maybe she would mention it to George. He had thought she was totally out to lunch with her getting-smaller idea.

“You're little enough as you are,” he had said one afternoon when she broached it with him. “You don't want to get any smaller; you'd be invisible.”

“That's the idea, Georgie.”

“You're nuts,” he said and flushed a splotchy red.

She went on as if he hadn't said it.

“It would make my work much simpler.”

“You've got your health to think about, Mrs. Mortimer.”

She had insisted by now that George call her by her chosen name.

“My health is just fine, thank you very much.”

“But it won't be if you steadfastly try to grow smaller. There is even a name for behaviour like that. It's an illness, Mrs. Mortimer. You don't want to make yourself ill.”

How the heck do you know what I want to make myself? she thought. But she didn't want George to be mad at her or to worry about her, so she let it go.

No, George probably wouldn't think getting bigger made any more sense than getting smaller. But she liked to talk her ideas over with him anyway. She wondered if he would understand about the warm feeling and her need to protect it.

She knew she could try out either idea, getting smaller or getting bigger, without George's blessing, but she did like to have him on her side.

Mrs. Mortimer was just five feet, one inch tall. She had a matronly appearance at a very young age — no waist, a kind of straight-up-and-down look. People often took her to be older than she was, even with her childlike ways. She stooped slightly and had worn glasses since the age of eight. On this day, the day of her curious warm feeling, she was a fairly elderly-looking twenty. Her age didn't often come up. There was no reason it would. She was just an odd little woman who took photographs.

“Let's take our hot chocolate outside,” she said.

It was after supper on that same November day. All the new snow had melted and there was no wind to speak of.

She and George set themselves up on the dusty porch furniture in their winter coats and gloves.

“I heard geese today,” said Mrs. Mortimer. “And last night I dreamed a robin.”

“It's a long time till spring,” said George.

It was nearly pitch dark already with only the dim glow from the street lights casting shadows.

She told him about the warm feeling and her hope to keep it safe.

“I get it about the warm feeling,” George said, “and I'm happy you've had it, but I know, I don't just think, I know, that you can't protect it by embiggening your body, as you say. It's something you can protect in other ways.”

“How, Georgie?”

She blew on her hot chocolate and took a tentative sip.

“Well, with your mind, for instance.”

“How?”

She was beginning to wish she hadn't mentioned it. George was about to explain something to her that she wasn't going to get.

“Well, let's see,” he said. “It may even be that the mind is called what it is because it minds things, like the feelings inside you. It looks after them if you let it, kind of like a babysitter minds kids, looks after them.”

“How do I let it?” she asked.

The sound of bicycle tires through a puddle broke the silence around them. A young man loomed out of the dark, leaving a small wake behind him as he passed. He waved and George waved back.

“That's Frank Foote,” he said. “Why didn't you wave?”

“I was thinking about what you said.”

Mrs. Mortimer waved now, but it was too late. The young man had already turned a corner.

“If someone is nice to you, you should be sure to be nice back,” George said.

“I know that by now, I think.”

“You should have waved at Frank. He's a good guy.”

“I was busy thinking about what you said. And I'm drinking hot chocolate. How many things do you expect me to do at once? Sheesh!”

George sighed and went inside. Mrs. Mortimer followed him.

“How do I let it?” she asked again.

“Let what?”

She couldn't remember what she was asking about. The conversation disappeared into the nowhere land that she imagined she would go to one day to find out all the things she couldn't understand or whose meanings she couldn't hang on to.

“Nothing,” she said.

She felt terrible about not waving to Frank in time. She should have known to do so. George said.

When she went to bed that night she relived the hospital scene as best she could in an effort to bring back the warm feeling.

It worked.

Mrs. Mortimer began to feel that her lucky days were those when she was summoned before life was entirely gone from a body. Families worried that their dead would get rolled away before they had their chance to get their pictures. They felt helpless up against hospital efficiencies. This happy situation didn't occur very often and it was under these circumstances that there were usually the most people hovering. They were desperate to be there in the last moments. If they stepped out briefly and missed that last good-for-nothing breath, they never forgave themselves. Mrs. Mortimer worked around them, inside them, through them.

She always felt a little disappointed when she heard, “She died just a few minutes ago.” Like her customers, she wanted to “be there for it.”

Families called her to wards at the hospitals: the St. Boniface, the Grace, the Victoria, the Misericordia, the General, the Children's, the Women's Pavilion. They called her to emergency rooms and intensive care units and to the Princess Elizabeth long-term care facility. They called her to their own homes and to funeral parlours, to lakeside cottages, farmers' fields, city parks and community centres — wherever the dead landed. And they landed everywhere.

Mrs. Mortimer didn't own a car, so someone would usually come and pick her up. She would be at the curb, at a moment's notice, with her camera in hand. She didn't pay a lot of attention to getting ready like some women do, just a dab of lavender behind each ear.

It was a mystery to her at first why so many people had a need to capture their loved ones in this way, but she didn't argue with their desires. What she did do was save up her earnings. Some people paid her handsomely and she never argued with that. She saved with an eye to purchasing the only thing she ever wanted: a long, low, ranch-style house on Wellington Crescent.

When she was a very young child, when her mother was still operating at partial capacity, her parents had made a yearly production of taking a drive to see the Christmas lights along the crescent. Her mother oohed and aahed and breathed out her fiery fumes. Her father pointed and exclaimed and organized his neck inside his tight white collar. George made snide comments and said “phony” a lot.

Mrs. Mortimer stayed quiet on the drives, as was her way. No one knew what she was thinking; they never did back then. But she was thinking something. It wasn't the festive Christmas decorations she saw on those long ago winter nights, but the light inside the houses, that ran sideways on and on, room after room, the impossible length of the homes.

Sometimes she saw a movement within the light and she imagined that it was a lady wearing high heels and lipstick and oven mitts. She pictured herself floating next to the woman, toward the bright kitchen with its fancy oven that warmed a chicken pot pie from Eaton's third floor. Mrs. Mortimer was sure that the glow in those long low homes differed from the colourless air at her own house. It was made from different stuff and existed only for the likes of the high-heeled lady and her lively friends and relatives. She would find her way inside that light one day. For now, she kept it in the back of her mind.

She didn't mention her dream-house plan to anyone, not even George. It would be discouraged, she knew, like most things were. The sheen would be removed from it if she put it out there to be batted around like an old softball. It would fall apart at the seams and its insides would tumble out and litter the hard earth, be ground to dust under mean feet. No. It was best to keep this dream inside.

As time passed and she had more and more photographs under her belt, she came to understand the need some people had to capture their loved ones in death. The need was the mystery itself: the mystery of death. Death as a lifeless face was something to peer into, to study and try to understand: to solve.

To herself, Mrs. Mortimer called her little operation “Capturing Death,” but only to herself. She had run it by George and he'd said no, it was no good.

Actually, he'd said, “Aye yi yi, Mrs. Mortimer. You can't call it that. You'll frighten away all your prospective customers.”

So she didn't call it anything.

Even before it happened, in April 1970, Mrs. Mortimer didn't like the words “Women's Pavilion.” They had a stink to them of blood and screams and sweat: the sweat of fat women and frightened men who hurried down the halls to get away from them. She didn't think there should be a pavilion just for women; there wasn't one for men. And it took away from the beautiful building in City Park that was also called a pavilion — actually it was called The Pavilion — where you could buy all-day suckers or “alldy” suckers, as the woman behind the counter called them. Sometimes the suckers tasted like blood to Mrs. Mortimer if she couldn't manage to keep thoughts of the other pavilion away.

She had scared George one day long before the bad thing happened.

“My sucker tastes like blood today,” she had said matter-of-factly and tossed it away.

“What?”

“It tastes like blood,” she said. “Like in the Women's Pavilion.”

“Jesus,” George said. “Maybe you shouldn't take pictures in that place if it's going to ruin our visits to the park.”

“I have to,” she said.

“Why?”

Sometimes it seemed to Mrs. Mortimer as if he hated the whole business, her whole business.

“Sorry, Georgie. I shouldn't have said anything. Coming to the park is good. I don't want to not come to the park, please.”

They walked toward the zoo.

“Babies are my favourites and that's mostly where I see them,” she said in answer to his question of why.

George looked sick. He also threw his sucker away but he waited till he found a garbage can.

“Dead babies,” he said.

“You shouldn't call them that.”

“Why on earth not? It's what they are, isn't it?”

“I guess so. But it sounds so harsh and even kind of untrue.”

Mrs. Mortimer bounced her plastic bag of breadcrumbs against her knee as she walked. She planned on feeding something in the zoo, whatever seemed hungry.

“Saying ‘babies who have died' sounds better to me,” she said. “It sounds as though they've done one thing — died — and they're on their way to do another thing. I don't know yet what that other thing is.”

There must have been a small hole in the breadcrumb bag because she was leaving a sporadic trail behind them.

“Whereas dead…dead shouldn't even be a word. There's no such thing as dead.”

“Surely there is,” said George.

“No.”

They walked in silence as they milled their way around a group of young children and their minders.

“Why are they your favourites, anyway, the babies?” George asked. “I can't imagine there being anything pleasant about taking pictures of tiny creatures that had no chance at life.”

“That's not the way I see it.”

“How do you see it?”

“I don't know if I know the words to explain it but I'll try to figure it out. Is it okay if I get back to you on that, Georgie?”

“Of course it is.” George put his arm around his sister and they walked like that for a while.

“It has something to do with the babies not really being here yet, not being totally disattached from the place they came from. Sometimes I imagine that they even have a choice and they say, ‘Nope, this ain't for me. I like that other place where it's warm and soft. I'm headin' back.'”

“That's a good explanation, Mrs. Mortimer,” George said. “Stop bouncing the breadcrumbs. You're losing them.”

“Maybe the babies like being with the people at the other end of life, the old ones in the place I almost glimpsed when that first man died in my presence. Remember him? Last November? His wife was worried that she wasn't there for his last breath and I knew he was already gone to the past-it place that's no longer here, but isn't elsewhere. It's a fine floating field of light breezes and soft tall grass; that's how I picture it.”

George let go of his sister and smiled at her as though there was a chance he liked what she said or at least didn't disagree with it vehemently as he so often did.

So she went on.

“Besides, they remind me of me.”

“Who?”

“The babies that have died.”

“How?”

“You know, Georgie.”

And he did, of course. She knew he was hoping upon hope that she wouldn't ask him to tell her again the story of how she had been born as a baby who died. She hadn't asked him for a couple of years and she wouldn't now. The story was down pat inside her.

“Do you think that you decided to stay on this earth,” he asked, “and not head back to where it was soft and warm? Was that your decision, Mrs. Mortimer?”

“No. In my case I had nothing to do with it.”

“How do you rationalize that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you different from the other babies that died?”

“Good question.”

“What's the answer to it?”

“I'm not sure yet, but it has something to do with penance.”

“What does that mean?”

“My life on this earth is a penance for something and somebody else is seeing to it that I pay. It's not my choice.”

“Who is this somebody else?” he asked and took the breadcrumbs away from her. “I thought you'd given up on God.”

“I have. No, this is something different. I haven't quite figured it out yet.”

“Mrs. Mortimer?”

“Yes, Georgie.”

“You haven't done anything bad. You don't have anything to pay for.”

“Then why do I feel the way I do?”

“I don't know. And I don't want to tell you that you're wrong about something — I've done enough of that over the years — but I know you're wrong about this.”

Mrs. Mortimer looked at her brother with a new expression on her face. She hoped it resembled a wry smile; she'd been practising it.

“What's with the weird new smile?” George asked.

“Let's look at the bears first,” said Mrs. Mortimer, “and save the monkeys till last.”

They entered the gate to the zoo.