Watching You Without Me

Lynn Coady

Contents (40)

Title page: Watching You Without Me by Lynn Coady.

Also by Lynn Coady

Strange Heaven

Play the Monster Blind

Saints of Big Harbour

Mean Boy

The Antagonist

Hellgoing

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All of the events and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Watching you without me / Lynn Coady.
Names: Coady, Lynn, 1970– author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190043792 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190043814 | ISBN 9781487006884 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487006891 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487006907 (Kindle)
Classification: LCC PS8555.O23 W38 2019 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

Book design: Alysia Shewchuk

Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council logos.

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

for the caregivers

(What if people really did that — sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent? A box of chocolates with centers like the yolks of turkey’s eggs. A mud doll with hollow eye sockets. A heap of roses slightly more fragrant than rotten. A package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open.)

— Alice Munro

I Brought This Mess to Town

1

I was in my mother’s room when the screen door opened and a man started to yell. It was so unexpected and disorienting that for a second I didn’t even know where I was. Then I glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand, with its red, oversized display for aging eyes, and remembered I’d been in here, kneeling at her empty bedside, for over an hour. I was supposed to be boxing things up, but mostly I’d spent the time laying various items across the bed and randomly smelling them.

Hullo there! How’s my girlfriend?

That was what he’d shouted, and now I could hear Kelli from her perch in the living room, babbling something pleased in reply. There was no reason to be alarmed. It was someone Kelli knew, therefore some appointment I must have overlooked in the schedule. The schedule was kept inside a chewed-up-looking file folder called Kelli’s World! (with a heart above the i), which my mother had maintained over the past few decades, and which I was only now beginning to successfully decode. In the numb and frantic days after my arrival, Kelli’s World! had been both blessing and curse. There’d been so much to do and so much to cancel — appointments I cancelled and then realized I needed, so had to call back and apologetically reschedule. Kelli had, for example, a back-to-back dentist and dermatologist appointment that inconveniently fell on what it was clear would be my mother’s final days — those appointments I cancelled, obviously. But I ended up rescheduling Kelli’s “friendship circle” at the community centre, as much of a pain as it was to drive her there and then back across the bridge to the hospital. It was just that I’d realized the friendship circle would allow me the opportunity to actually be alone with my mother for the first time in I didn’t know how many years. An opportunity I figured I’d better seize.