Daniel / Mr. Thériault Part 1-5 (B@GoE)
Mr. Thériault/ Isabelle/ Daniel Storyline - Backstage @ the Garden of Eden
Daniel caught snowflakes on his tongue. His eyes closed, he looked up at the sky, arms flung outward giving over to his joy. The hand-knit red mittens, his mother made, hung from the strings that kept them from getting lost from each other. His mom shoveled the snow that fell overnight. It was already piled high along the driveway. Daniel played in his blue snowsuit, climbing the banks, and sliding down. He loved winter. The crisp air, the sunny days, and the physical exertion of climbing, falling, climbing again.
Daniel had only known 4 winters in his short life. They were always full of discovery and adventure. He loved getting ready for kindergarten, putting on his snowsuit and boots, and running to the end of the driveway to catch his bus. Daniel’s bus stopped right near his house. His bus driver was Mr. Thériault. He always greeted Daniel with a big hello. “Hello Danny! How are you today? Climb up those stairs little man!” Daniel eagerly sat behind Mr. Thériault where he could see him in the big mirror. Daniel loved Mr. Thériault and nothing could contain his excitement when it was time to see him.
On this day, Daniel’s mom was busy with the baby and was late getting outside to shovel. There was a big snowfall last night. The sky was overcast, and snow still fell. The dullness of the sky and snow made the whole world seem like it was one color. Daniel had been home sick for a few days and today was the first time he was allowed outside with his mom to ‘help shovel the snow’. He pushed around his little red shovel for a few minutes before he began to climb the big drifts and piles that had accumulated.
Daniel was on climbing a snowbank when he heard the familiar sound of the school bus rounding the corner and accelerating down the street. Mr. Thériault! It was his bus! Daniel jumped down the snowbank and ran toward the road. The piles of snow were like mountains next to this little boy. The bus driver accelerated slightly coming out of the curve. There was no possibility of seeing the little boy in the blue snowsuit. He disappeared before the driver saw him.
The screams of Daniel’s mother and the glance by the driver in his side mirror, brought the bus to a stop several houses away. This wasn’t Daniel’s bus. It wasn’t his beloved Mr. Thériault. It was a young man whose life was forever changed, along with everyone else in Daniel’s life. Daniel lay still, the white snow slaughtered by his blood. His mittens ripped from his tiny hands.
The Apprentice sat for a moment, holding the mittens she’d found in the soil, as the images assaulted her. She pressed them together almost feeling the tiny hands that used to wear them. She returned them to the soil. The innocent’s gift.
Mr. Thériault never drove the bus again. He retired for a second time that day. While he wasn’t the one responsible for little Danny’s death, he couldn’t help but play that scenario over and over in his mind. For him, it was a sign.
Mr. Thériault had been an insurance adjuster in his first career. It was a job that might have bored many. He spent hours at his desk, having very little interaction with others. His desk was always perfectly tidy. His inbox was emptied, and he sharpened his pencils to a fine point with his automatic sharpener at the end of each day. He brought his lunch in a brown paper bag that he reused until it fell apart. He ate tuna fish sandwiches on white bread, and a bit of mayo, an apple and 2 Dad’s oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. He limited himself to 2 cups of coffee and always ate at his desk.
He took his job very seriously. It was his job to judge people’s character and honesty in making recommendations to the insurance company about their claims. He was often accused of ‘playing god’ with people’s lives after terrible events such as robberies, accidents, or natural disasters. He knew even optimists quietly paid for their ‘positivity’ in monthly installments, hedging their bets against the worst happening. Crossing their fingers behind their backs.
He did not consider himself a superstitious person. You’d never find a rabbit’s foot or lucky penny in his pocket, but he did use the same coffee mug every day with a quote from Henry Ford on it: “If you think you can, or you can’t, you are right”. He witnessed some extraordinarily good and bad luck in his business. Some people seemed to have a black cloud over them. Misfortune hung over them like the clouds over the mountains, caught there bringing misery. They were a bad risk to people like Mr. Thériault.
The nurse called from the Hospice where his wife lay dying from cancer. She said, “It’s time. It won’t be long now.” He stood, pushed in his chair, sharpened the pencil he used that day, put it in his clean coffee mug and walked out of the brokerage where he’d worked for 34 years. The only thing left on his desk was an envelope with his resignation in it. It was not to his boss directly but “To whom it may concern”.
He was in the backseat of a taxi when he got another call from the nurse. She spoke more urgently, in a whisper. “How far are you?”
“Not far.” The taxi driver flicked his eyes at him in the rearview and then ahead at the mess of cars straddling lanes, trying to slalom through the impossible, late afternoon traffic.
“You need to say good-bye”, she said. She abruptly held the phone to Mrs. Theriault’s ear.
“'Belle, my darling. I… thank you, for everything”.
“Teddy” she said, and he heard a choked sigh. The nurse came back on and said words like “I’m sorry”, and “she’s gone…” She said the words people say. He hung up unaware of what else was said.
Mr. Thériault put his phone in the breast pocket of his jacket, close to his heart. He tapped the glass between he and the driver and told him they were no longer in a hurry. The driver shot him a look like he might be joking as they had not moved more than a few inches in several minutes. He saw the tears on the man’s face and stopped himself from making a smart remark.
No one at the insurance brokerage knew Mr. Thériault’s wife had been sick or died, no one knew he even had a wife. The lunchroom speculation of who ‘Mr. T’ really was became legend. Near the end he was the subject of a particularly cruel office pool. “Would he die at his desk? Or be forced out?” When his colleagues learned of his wife’s death, the chart quietly came down. Some of his colleagues visited his now empty office to peer in to try to see what they hadn’t before, trying to understand who this man was and justify their cruelty. Too few were ashamed of how they had embraced the shunning behaviour and the grotesque stories of who he really was – paedophile, rapist, cannibal? Slowly, his chair, pencils, desk lamp and other office equipment disappeared. Those who ‘survived him’, absorbed his allotment like quicksand until it was as though he’d never been there. Even his mug found its way to the desk of one of his worst detractors.
That fall, Mr. Thériault trained to be a bus driver because it was the closest thing to being a teacher he could find. His wife had taught elementary school for over 35 years. She retired and became ill in the same year. She loved ‘her children’, not being able to have any of her own. She put everything into shaping and caring for her students.
Being a bus driver allowed Mr. Thériault to roll up in front of the school his wife, Isabelle, taught at and loved. Her retirement was a big event at the school. There were hundreds of cards, and flowers. Tears and reunions with children, now grown, she’d taught. In some cases, she taught several generations from the same family. Mr. Thériault was ‘grampa’ to many young children on his bus route, he always had sweets for the kids he knew needed it most: not the sugar, the kindness. He grew to recognize the sunken eyes. He would see each of them, they raised their eyes to his. Those few blocks riding around with him, were safe and warm those who had so little. They were so different from those who shone like silver, thriving in the world like Danny.
Daniel was a new addition to his route that fall. Daniel happily accepted ‘Danny’ as Mr. Theriault’s nickname for him. He exploded onto the bus each time, excited and full of new stories to share. He chattered at Mr. Thériault, telling him about a stream of events and grinning at him when he wasn’t talking. He always sat behind Mr. Thériault so he could be seen ‘big’ in the mirror. Mr. Thériault had to remind him to sit down sometimes as Danny bounced in his seat, eager to go to school. Mr. Thériault wondered what his dear Isabelle would make of this little spark. He spoke to her about him as he sat at their dining room table each night. Two places set, linen napkins ironed the way she liked, and Dahlias, in her favourite vase, when he could find them. He’d reach out to touch the space between their plates looking for her hand. The void impossible to close.
When he learned of Danny’s horrific death, he felt overwhelming grief and terrible relief at the same time. It was not him. He was not responsible; he wouldn’t have been able to bear it if it had been him. But some other poor wretch was. That person may never recover.
Certainly, Danny’s mother would not. She collapsed at his funeral. Mr. Thériault didn’t introduce himself for fear that making the connection to being ‘Danny’s bus driver’, the person Danny was running to see that day, might be too much to absorb. How does a light like that go out and not leave an endless blackness? His Isabelle, "Belle’, left a hole in his chest too deep to fill. He couldn’t imagine the loss Danny’s mom now endured. The picture of Danny at the front of the church was a photograph capturing his beautiful soul and the light that emanated from him. He couldn’t get that sweet boy’s smile out of his mind. He never drove the bus again.
The next year, he planted a Red Maple in his back yard to remind him of this little boy. The garden had been Isabelle’s, but he nurtured it and grew to love it as the years went by. Before she got ill, she had begun to plant shrubs and trees in the yard to commemorate students she had lost over the years, to drunk drivers, suicide, cancer and careless teenage hijinx. He knew all their names and would visit them, tend to their memory. Each fall, he felt the excitement in the neighbourhood, the new beginnings that come with start of the school year. All reminders to him of love and loss now but he grew to love each season’s passage. The scarlet leaves fell from Danny’s tree, like red mittens, lost and forgotten until spring.
The Apprentice slipped between the silk sheets of the physical and metaphysical world. She was comfortable there, unseen. She was in the Arrivals area. She sensed there would be a passage.
The small boy’s arrival transformed the burned-out oak. The starkness replaced by signs of growth, welcoming and familiar. The colours appearing as they might on the other side, sharp and green. The boy, no longer bound by his snowsuit, raced up to the tree evaluating how he might conquer it. Before he tried, he spied the telephone at his height, like the one in his home, a soft cream colour. He picked up the receiver.
“Hello Daniel, my name is Ariel at Reception”.
“My mommy said not to speak to strangers.”
“Your mommy knows you’re here. We knew you would be calling today.”
“Is Mr. Thériault here? I was going to see him”.
“Not yet. His wife, Isabelle is here though. She looks forward to meeting you. If you push open the gate and come into the garden, you’ll find her there.”
The apprentice pushed herself back into the foliage to not be seen by the boy. He must not be interrupted at this moment.
Daniel rushed past as a warm breeze, rustling the leaves of the oak, whispering his arrival. The gate swung closed again. The apprentice slipped on Isabelle’s gardening gloves, forming around her as though holding her hand, and returned to her work in the garden.
The brittle vertical blinds fluttered rhythmically in the breeze coming through the slight gap in the window. The sparrows flit from branch to branch of the trembling aspens, twittering their morning gossip lively and insistent. Auni strides to the window to close it and pulls up Mr. Thériault’s covers.
“Who left this window open, sir? You know that’s not allowed. You must have a girlfriend, Mr. Theriault?”
The tiniest of smiles appears on Mr. Thériault’s face, his eyes move slowly from Auni and back to the window.
He coughs slightly. Auni brings him the sponge to moisten his mouth and then bends the straw toward Mr. Thériault’s mouth so he may sip some water.
“I heard you were singing again last night, Mr. Thériault."
Again, he smiled. He felt weak this morning.
“I would love to hear you sing sometime. Maybe we could sing together?” he said and laughed in a deep baritone. “Maybe we can try a little later?” Mr. Thériault slowly blinked an acknowledgement.
He felt the cold breeze on the inside. He felt joyful but could not express it. His throat was parched despite the water. He had sung in the old way last night – to express his joy. He appeared to be a soloist, but he was in fact accompanied by a full choir all around him. When that woman came in the evenings, pushing her cart, they would sing together to bring the others. It was a unifying sound of emotion and music unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It was leading him, providing comfort.
It was time for the gentle Auni to roll him to treat his sores. He closed his eyes as he escaped to his garden, hummed a little, remembered happy times with Isabelle.
They waited by his bed and watched him sleep, mouth open, dry. Air hardly drawn in anymore. The morning light creeped across the floor. She nodded for him to begin. Danny touched Mr. Thériault’s shoulder. His eyes rolled under his lids and stopped with his heart. A long exhale.
Mr. Thériault had enjoyed the company of that little spark, Danny these past few weeks. Always in the early morning when he’d died all those years ago. Still that sunny smile. No one seemed to notice him. Auni walked past the boy, chattering away about the weather, and asking how he was doing. Mr. Thériault only mumbled “mittens”, “garden”. His words didn’t seem to come or make sense to Auni. Lalitha whispered, “stroke” to Auni one day, and he nodded.
Mr. Thériault’s life felt full those last days. He was whole again like when he and Isabelle were first married. Danny was the only one who visited him here, until this morning. Isabelle stood by his bed and took his hand. He felt such a relief to go home with her now, his body worn out.
Grace stood in the corner of his room, watching Mr. Thériault go. The light changed a little, a swirl of dust, a sigh and he was gone. She breathed out, a long exhale. She pressed the call button. She winked at the place where her friend had been and pushed her cart out of his room, confident they would no longer find him there.