Crossings by Betty Lambert Page A

mean, where a relative comes in quite lucid, quite coherent, and the functioning …’ He thought better of going on. ‘Mr Ferris and I have agreed,’ he said, ‘we have agreed, that perhaps he should have therapy.’
    And that is how Ben went to Essondale. Crease. That is how Ben went to Crease instead of me.
    Barranca
. That’s the word. I remembered.
    So Jocelyn and I moved into the house. It looked lovely. I’d spent a whole month cleaning it, painting it, buying furniture from the Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul’s. The fake Sarukhan rugs. The Renoir reproduction of the girl with the cat. Blinds made to order. Curtains. It was a terrible mess when I found it. When I opened the door of the oven (the landlord sold me the stove for ten dollars), I was met with a solid block of green. I couldn’t figure out what it was at first. It was mold. When I tackled it, like an idiot, with a bucket of Spic ’n Span, I got knocked clear across the kitchen, landing up against the glass-fronted cabinets. Actually, I didn’t feel too bad. Wham. Right across the kitchen, as if some great fist had caught me in the stomach. I sat there for quite a while, and then I started to laugh. I was still laughing when I found the electrical shutoff in the cellar. ‘Well, I got shock treatment anyway,’ I said to the fuse box. In the crawl spaces under the eaves, the former tenants had thrown all their garbage. That took me three days. Razor blades. Apple cores. Incredible, and they were Germans. The panelling in the dining room was real mahogany. When it was oiled it came up beautifully. There were stained-glass windows at the entrance and in the dining room window. Even in the glass door on the built-in buffet. A dream of a house with a blue-tiled fireplace. And a garden. Rose bushes. A lawn. All for seventy-five dollars a month. I’d never spent so much, but Jocelyn and I were going to rent one of the bedrooms. I bought a lawn mower, a hose, a pitch fork. A shovel for the furnace. An axe. When I left, the landlord’s wife complained. It was in beautiful condition, that house, beautiful. When she moved in. ‘She’s going to have to pay damages.’ This to Ben.
    We moved in, Jocelyn and I. And one week later, Ben signed himself out of Essondale. ‘I was wrong. I couldn’t have worked there. Crease, I mean. They keep you busy all the time. It’s ridiculous. They took away my razor.’
    There was nowhere else for him to go. I let him move into the sun porch. Had to order a complete new set of blinds. Thirty-two dollars and fifty cents. Made the drapes out of a nice blue and brown striped flannel, eight dollars. The bed was the big blow: forty-eight ninety-five. I just gave it away two weeks ago.
    Jocelyn and I slept in the big bedroom. We could still rent the other, with Ben in the sun porch. But then Francie, my youngest sister, arrived. Ben would spend hours telling her how he was going to commit suicide.
    I can come back to this. I don’t have to talk about this now.
    It’s a year later, almost a year. Yes, a year. I am divorced now. I’m in West Vancouver doing housework for a week and Jocelyn phones.
    â€˜We rented the room!’
    â€˜Oh good.’
    â€˜To a man.’
    â€˜Yeah, well, we knew that might happen.’
    â€˜Well, I figure we can use the money.’
    â€˜What’s he like?’
    â€˜He’s a clerk at city hall.’
    I see a pale blond man, glasses, concave chest.
    â€˜That sounds all right.’
    â€˜So when you coming home?’
    Mik tells me his side of the story later.
    He’d been out of the Pen about eight months. Living downtown on Granville Street, in hotels that have names like the Helen’s and the Queen’s. He was sitting in the Helen’s one day and he decided to go across the bridge. To sit in the Helen’s is distinct from to crash at the Helen’s. If you sit, you