Nocturne by Helen Humphreys

Author:Helen Humphreys [Humphreys, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781443415477
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2013-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

19

I’m on a train, riding through the flat southwestern Ontario landscape in the early morning. The sun isn’t up yet, but the horizon is tinged pink with the promise of it. The clouds are low, dark streaks over the fields.

There was a beautiful sunrise on the December morning that you died. I woke early in your new apartment that day and just lay there in the dark for a while before getting up. Mum had arrived by then and I had given her your bed. I slept on the divan in the living room, in a sort of propped-up position that was not as uncomfortable as it had seemed it might be. Sleeping in the front room was noisy because Hastings Street was right outside the window and there was always traffic moving up and down it, day or night. I liked waking early in your apartment and lying in the dark looking at your books in the bookcases, your pictures stacked against the walls. Your possessions were comforting, familiar. I had woken to these same objects many times over the years, in all of the places you had lived.

After you died, when I was coming back to your apartment to clean it out, I was looking forward to seeing your space with your things as you had arranged them. But there had been an infestation of bedbugs in your building in my absence, and your landlady had sprayed your apartment, and to do that she’d had to move everything away from the walls, so that your stuff was just a piled jumble in the centre of each room. All the careful placement of your items, that delicate arrangement, gone.

The sunrise was visible from the hospital corridor windows on the walk to your room in the ICU. I remember stopping at the windows for a moment before continuing in to see you, and just watching the deep red of the sky. That afternoon, after you died, the sky was the same colour over the mountains on the way out of the hospital. It almost felt as if time hadn’t advanced at all, that the hours between the sunrise and sunset had never happened.

When I stood at the window that morning, watching the sunrise, I knew that you were going to die that day. The doctor had said to us the afternoon before, “We need to think about letting him go.”

This sunrise isn’t quite as good as that one. Maybe the cold air over the mountains helped to stain the sky such a dark red that morning. Here, the space above the fields is infused with pink, a smudge of colour over the dark trees.

I’m on my way back from a reading. The book we went to Paris to research is finally out and I’ve been travelling around to promote it. Maybe you would like it, Martin. I’m not sure, because you never read my books. I don’t know why. You kept all my reviews, though. I found them after you died.

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