~
Bruises Don’t Leave Scars
“I want to die.”
Her father repeats himself as if Clare can’t hear him, raising and lowering his tone, enunciating each word as if she cares, as if she too isn’t praying for his quick death.
She tries to shake the thoughts from her mind every evening she falls asleep on the couch beside the hospital bed taking up most of her small living room, but she can’t help it. She tosses up prayers to the God she stopped believing in because of her father, hoping at least he isn’t dead in the morning because of anything she thinks or dreams. But no matter what she thinks or dreams or prays, every morning she opens her ears before her eyes and hopes she hears nothing, hopes she might turn to him and find him dead.
Clare said it to her brother once, weeks before the hospital bed was delivered to her one-bedroom apartment. They argued for hours, her drunk, him high on some combination of pills and pot, about who was going to take care of him. The father who hated them both. The one who’d be homeless if they couldn’t decide to be better people. Cam just said it, “You’re better than me.” He was right, of course, and before the words spilled out of her mouth she was sobbing. “I go to bed every night and pray the phone will ring and it’ll be his loser landlord on the other line, telling us he’s already gone.”
“Who wouldn’t want this guy dead?” Cam said.
After spending a life thrashing his hate on to the backs and asses of his two children, their dad got some fantastic cancer that doctors promised wouldn’t kill him, if he got weekly transfusions and took his pills. He had also suggested their father stop drinking and smoking, which he did not.
Clare helps her father to sit on the plastic chair in the bathtub. She turns the water from scalding hot to warm. She likes to fill the shower with steam so she doesn’t have to face his fragility, his humanness. She tests the temperature on her forearm. His skin has thinned and the blood pools into burgundy bruises up and down his arms and legs. Clare imagines it is the donor blood struggling to get through his veins, looking for an escape.
Her father flinches as her hand sweeps across his shoulder blade. It surprises her and she jerks her hand back and cracks her knuckles on the ceramic tile wall.
“For fuck sakes, daddy.”
The bar of soap has slipped out of the facecloth. She squirts some shampoo on to the cloth and washes his face and pits before handing him the cloth to sloppily swipe at his own balls. Her father turns his head away from her, squeezes his eyes shut and raises an arm in a defensive move.
“Daddy,” Clare repeats it until he opens his eyes.
His lower lids droop with the weight of tears, filling like little canoes sinking in the middle of a lake. Clare moves a wisp of white hair from his forehead and kisses it gently. I might want you dead, but I’d never hit you, she thinks, before slowly moving her hands down his arms until she reaches his hand. After he doesn’t properly clean himself, she rinses the cloth and moves down toward his feet.
As she softly sweeps the flannel cloth over his legs she focuses on each wine-stained splodge, rubbing them gently as if she can somehow erase them. When he dies will they disappear, removing any evidence of his suffering? His arms and legs are just bones sheathed in tissue paper thin skin when once they were filled with muscles so powerful, they could bruise her flesh with a light thump or swift kick.
Bruises don’t leave scars. A sixteen-year-old Cam spat these words into their father’s face with a mouthful of blood, and he laughed as each one of her father’s punches landed. Clare begged him to stop. She begged Cam to stop. Clare could calm her father’s rage faster than Cam, if she cried, if she repeated I love you, over and over, if she shouted I am sorry again and again, even when she had nothing to be sorry for. But Cam refused to let him win.
“One day you’ll be out of my life forever. And there will be nothing. The bruises will be gone and there will be no sign you ever existed.”
When Cam left for good, he took only his swim bag. Clare showed up at the pool and watched Cam, as he paraded the deck in his Speedo showing off the purple and yellow belt marks across his back and legs, the bloodied lip and black eye. That day Cam went to live with the head coach and Clare had to go home.
“Can you rub cream on my back,” her father says, “it’s so damn itchy.”
Clare pumps a big blob into her hand.
When she stands between his legs to reach behind him, he wraps his arms around her thighs. “Had we never loved so kindly, had we never loved so blindly, never met, or never parted, we had never been broken hearted.”
Clare kneels down in front of him and her father’s tremoring hands cup the sides of her face. He kisses her on the lips and asks, “Do you love me, pet?” And she can see in his eyes she is not Clare to him in this moment, but Elizabeth, his dead wife, her mother.
“I love you, Daddy,” she says.
He winces as she dries his body. The towel must feel like razor blades against his thin flesh.
The phone rings. She puts his clothes on his lap.
“Don’t answer it,” he says.
Clare stands and her father grasps the fabric of her pajamas between two fingers and nearly pulls down her pants as she steps out of the tub.
When she returns to the bathroom, the water is running again, soaking the pajamas on his lap.
“For fuck sakes,” she shouts into the receiver.
“I told you not to answer it. Nobody important ever calls,” her father says.
It’s Cam. He’s high. He’s crying into the phone.
“I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” Clare says to him.
Clare reaches for another towel, but her father does the same thing and in one quick second, he’s screaming splayed out on the tile floor.
“You have to come and get me. They won’t let me leave,” Cam says.
“Where are you?”
She has the phone squeezed between her ear and shoulder as she pulls her father up.
“The ER. They want to put me on a seventy-two-hour hold.”
“Now, why would they want to do that?”
She knows the answer. Cam has recently started reliving their childhood. Stealing inner tubes from the local tire store and swimming so far out into the middle of the lake, it takes him hours to get back. Last week, he floated on to a private beach belonging to a house so big he thought it was a hotel. He walked straight into the owner’s kitchen. Early Spring, he broke into the carousel at the beach in the middle of the night, somehow turned it on and jumped from horse to horse until he face-planted on the concrete floor. When he showed up at the emergency, his dislocated jaw hung loose from his bloodied face. He just had the wires removed a week ago.
“I jumped off the lakeside bridge,” he says.
As kids, jumping off that bridge was for strong swimmers only and so of course Clare and Cam did it, as much to show off to their friends as to extend the time it takes to walk home. They would practically beg their friends to dare Cam to jump. Both of them would point and laugh at the big yellow warning signs before diving into the rushing water. They’d race to the rocks, never worrying they could get sucked back, under the bridge and down the thirty-foot drop into the canal. And when they arrived home, their father would ask if they jumped off the bridge. Clare would shout, no way, and Cam would say, fuckin’ rights we did. And they’d both get stripped of their swimsuits and whipped with whatever belt their father had looped through his pants.
Today, the canal doesn’t exist, so when you jump in you don’t get sucked anywhere. The water is lower and shallower and the jump higher, so it goes without saying, anyone who makes the leap might look suicidal.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” Clare says.
On the hospital bed now, her father makes a fuss as she tries to put his foot into the leg of his pajamas.
“Daddy, stop moving.” After he’s dressed, she presses both legs in to the bed, then tucks the blankets tightly under the mattress. Like a swaddled newborn, her father calms when she makes it so he can hardly move.
“I’ll be there in about twenty minutes,” she says.
“And I’m going to have to stay with you,” Cam says.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re going to make you sign a form or something saying I’m staying with you for three days.”
“You can’t stay here.”
“You just have to say I am.”
“Holy fuck.”
“Language,” her father says.
“Seriously, daddy? Go to sleep.” As if she hadn’t spent her entire life listening to him shit, fuck and damn his way through everything. Her ability to quote any Scottish poet, her passive aggressive style of arguing and her overuse of the f-word comes from him and it pisses her off that his current demented view of the world leaves out all the shit Clare and Cam can never forget.
“Twenty minutes,” she says before ending the call.
Back at the apartment, Cam pushes open the door so hard, it knocks a small painting to the floor. He kicks off his sneakers and hangs his jean jacket on the coat rack.
“Don’t talk to him. Don’t speak too loudly. Don’t touch my beer. Don’t smoke in my apartment.” Clare relays the familiar list of rules she knows Cam will not follow.
He stands at the foot of the bed.
“Hey Pops, you look like shit,” Cam says.
“Rule # 1. Don’t talk to him.”
Cam goes to the fridge and pulls out one of Clare’s beers and twists it open. He reclines in their father’s favourite chair and turns on the television. He punches up the volume on the hockey game until Clare swipes the clicker from his hand and presses mute. She will not engage in petty bullshit with him right now.
“Still fucking that Mark guy?” he says.
“Still fucking up your life?” she says.
“Not working out at the gym, I see,” he says.
Clare is wearing the only pants that fit her, yoga pants she found at a second-hand place downtown.
“When’s the last time you were in the water?” she says.
“Tonight, actually.”
“Not the lake, asshole, the pool.”
“Turns out City Masters aren’t fond of cannabis, even though it’s now legal in several states, provinces and almost every progressive country in the world.”
Cam started smoking pot in second year university, started selling it in third year and Clare has no idea when the pills started.
“So, you’re not swimming then?” Clare says.
“Not for a while.”
Cam stands up and places his hand on her arm and gives it a gentle squeeze. His skin on hers is jarring and she almost pulls away, but the sight of his fingers resting, fleshless and frail on her arm catches her breath. His fingernails bitten down so low the skin is growing over them. When she looks up at him, Cam is staring at their father, asleep, his oxygen machine whirring beside him.
“What do you think?” Cam says.
“One of these days he won’t wake up,” Clare says, “What am I supposed to do?”
“I’ve got some sweet, sweet pills we could crush and slip into his tea.”
“Fuck off,” she says.
Cam goes to his father’s bedside.
Clare follows him, suddenly worried he might strangle him or something. He kisses him on the forehead and lifts the blanket up to his chin.
“I love you pops.”
Clare doesn’t want to cry, but she can’t help it. The tears just come. She was abused, but she never thought her father didn’t love her. Cam was assaulted and she is sure her father hated him.
“Want a smoke?” Cam says.
Clare grabs a couple of beers and the bottle of gin from the kitchen cabinet above the fridge and they step out on to the balcony. As Cam lights one of his joints, he watches their father through the window, not blinking even as the thick smoke hits his eyes.
Clare and Cam were not particularly affectionate and now she wonders what it would feel like to kiss him, to wrap her arms around him and hold him like maybe their mother had so long ago. But she knows she won’t feel anything. Her last boyfriend told her she was a shell of a person, a hard-ass bitch, a cold callous cunt and then he threw shit at her; an empty bottle of gin, a few beer bottles and a mug full of hot coffee. And she stood there laughing and calling him a fucking child over and over until he left the apartment and never came back.
“Bruises don’t leave scars,” she says.
“Huh?” Cam turns to her with a grin and takes a swig of his beer
Cam is still a cowering and crying child inside a scarred body and Clare knows he will only come out when it’s safe.
When their father is dead.
Clare puts the gin to her lips and tips the bottle high in the air.
“You want to go swimming?” she says.
“I’ve already been, thanks,” he says.
“For real. The university pool’s open until eleven.”
“I don’t think so,” he says.
But she wants to and so she begs and pleads like her little girl self until he finally gives over. She grabs a bikini bottom for him and a one-piece for her.
They take her bike with him on the handlebars. She never did trust him after he once pulled the brakes so hard she took a header into the back of a pickup truck.
At the pool, Clare is in the water first and she sprints to the bulkhead. When Cam exits the changeroom he goes immediately to the starting block at lane four and climbs up, doing one of his epic five metre dives, not surfacing until he is beside her, then spraying her with spit and water.
“So predictable,” she says
They both lift themselves up on to the bulkhead and then plunge feet first to the bottom of the pool.
They sit cross legged and pretend to sip tea just as they did thousands of times as kids. Clare can see scar tissue dots on both sides of his neck as the veins swell from the pressure of holding his breath. Her lungs are burning. She’s been drinking to get drunk and smoking a pack of cigarettes every day since her father moved in.
Clare reaches through the water with both hands and kisses Cam on the cheek before pulling him up to the surface in a tight embrace. She thinks about the pills he has in his bag at the apartment, and wonders how many and if anyone will care if their father dies in a few weeks or tonight.
~
Alison Gadsby is a writer living in Toronto. She graduated from UBC with an MFA in Creative Writing and York University with an HBA in Creative Writing and English. She has also attended a writers’ retreat at the Banff Centre. Her work has won awards and scholarships, both at UBC and at York. She is the founder/curator/host of Junction Reads, a prose reading series in Toronto. She is completing a final revision of a novel and continues to work on the short stories in her ‘swimming’ collection.