Free A Good House by Bonnie Burnard Page B

sullen.
    Instead, she told them, “Women expect strength from men, and gentleness and absolute loyalty. And a good ear.” She said, “You will have to work hard if you expect to raise a family.” Looking just at Patrick and Paul, meaning it as a joke, she said, “You might even have to think about giving up hockey.” Then she took the deepest breath she could take. “Of course sex is fun,” she said. “Likely, you have already discovered that. But you should try to get it into your heads that with just a little extra thought, a little extra time taken, it can be something altogether different, altogether more.” She didn’tmake them sit there wondering if they had to say anything back to her about any of this. She shooed them out of the room like small boys told to stay away from the creek in the spring, hoping only that she hadn’t lied to them.
    Bill had offered to set up a small bed for himself in an empty corner of the living room in case his rolling around in his sleep disturbed Sylvia or gave her discomfort. As proof of his consideration, he borrowed a foldaway cot from the McKellars down the street and wheeled it into the dining room where it stood ready, sheets and all, but Sylvia told him no, she didn’t want that, not yet. All these months they had continued to do what they could, when they could. Cooper had told them early on and pointedly to go ahead and take whatever pleasure was available to them.
    Cooper told Bill now that Sylvia was on a very high dosage, which he was more than ready to up if he became convinced she needed it. He said that death comes in different ways to different people, more ways than an average layman could imagine, and that an easy death was still possible. He said there was no reason to anticipate extraordinary pain, not with the dosage he had her on.
    Bill never did set up the cot. In the last week of July, Sylvia didn’t want to eat anything and then she began to fall into an extremely deep sleep that could last the night and through the next day and overnight and halfway through the day again. Cooper said this was the blessing of her brain’s own morphine, better than man-made.
    When she came out of these sleeps she could speak only a few necessary words, could hardly take a drink, could only breathe and listen and watch. Bill stayed home and the kids got some time off from their summer jobs and someone stayed with her in the living room every minute, often two at a time. On the last of these sleeping days and nights Bill was with her and, exhausted beyond discipline, beyond even his time overseas, he crawled in and slept beside her. He woke from a dream of rolling fingers and knew without looking.
    He took a few minutes for himself, stayed mute on his side of the bed, resisting full consciousness, making it wait. As was his sleepy habit, he reached to smooth her eyebrows, to try to smooth the lines from her forehead. Then he sat up, stood up in his pyjamas. Hetidied her hair the best he could and straightened the pillow and then he made himself search beneath the quilts to find her hands, to bring them out over the quilts because she looked so strange lying there without her hands.
    He manoeuvred through the hall and up the stairs to wake the kids, sitting for a few minutes on the top step to listen to the memory of Sylvia’s voice telling him what to say to them when this day came, but by the time he reached the first warm bed he had nothing in him but silence. He couldn’t help them when they opened their eyes.
    When their first wretched grief, loud and clumsy beyond remembering, was almost spent, when the July sun, which was nothing more to him now than the blunt instrument, the mindless impulse of an emptied day, was fully risen, Bill went into the kitchen to phone Cooper and they all stayed in the living room until they heard the Cadillac pull into the driveway. Cooper brought fresh morning air in with him and turn by turn he put one warm arm around their