Ledger of the open hand, p.13
Ledger of the Open Hand, page 13
“There’s a headstone for that!” She writhed away from his hands like he was an electric eel.
We were alone, a week to the day after the funeral and everyone long gone, even Daneen. It surprised me, that people would think it was over as soon as Gord was in the ground, think they could just pack up and stand down. It wasn’t over. It wasn’t better and Gord was still dead and there was only me left to look after our parents.
So for me, that white cross in the ditch was at least some sign that everyone else in the world hadn’t completely forgotten about Gord being dead.
“Maybe it’s like a warning,” I said, “to tell other people to watch out.” It seemed like the right idea, and at first I wondered if it was something the town took care of, like a yield sign—a way to say, “Hey, pay attention. This is dangerous.”
My parents were too focused on each other to even hear me.
“Someone must have thought it was important.” Dad put his hands back on Mom’s shoulders but he was shaking violently, and Mom’s lips were parted as if she was panting. Finally she made a sound—a terrifying sound that made my father pull his hands away from her. The sound went with them, like he’d unplugged her.
The world was quiet until Mom said, “Every time I drive past there, I don’t want to have to be reminded that my son is dead.” She slapped her right hand against her chest. “Dead.”
Dad fixed his eyes somewhere near the back of her skull. “Don’t drive that way if you want so much to forget.” I saw it then—Dad’s face, the wreckage of it. The exhausted, unshaven, unslept, unhinged ruin of him. He shouted so loud I backed up. “As if we’re ever going to forget that our son is dead!”
I’d been trying for so long not to cry in front of them, not to start anything, but it rose to my throat and my face buckled and I couldn’t stop it and I couldn’t get away, either. I was afraid to leave them.
Mom turned her attention to me then. “Why are you still here?”
“Doris—” All the rage had drained from my father’s voice.
She ignored him, kept her gaze steady on me. “Go home and leave us alone.”
74.
I DIDN’T TURN on a single light in the apartment. I just dropped everything—my purse, the clothes I’d crammed into plastic Food way bags—and when I bumped into that big couch, I sat down. Then I lay down and I counted the cars driving past, the thrum of engines tearing the fragile air. I understood then, an off-to-the-side thought, why my mother was spending so much time in rooms with the lights out.
I’d expected the apartment to release me. I thought grief would rip out of me loud and long and awful, but that was still weeks away. That first night I lay still on the couch, pressed down by the heat rising from the rooms underneath, by the radiators knocking and the tires grinding on the snow-packed street. Eventually I slept, ten hours straight, and woke up with my shoes still on.
That was the worst of it, waking up into the bright of a Sunday morning, the world holding its frozen breath. I walked through the silent rooms, ran a hand over all the still-there furniture: the rounded backs of the kitchen chairs, the flat, leathery arm of the couch, the surprisingly rough, cold surface of Gord’s stereo equipment. And then I noticed it—the smell of him. Faint, but everywhere. It drew me to his bedroom and I fell face forward into his pillow, into that thick, sweet Gord smell. When I left the room a long time later, I closed the door to seal it in, to keep it from dissipating so I could visit him whenever I needed to.
Then I went down to check the mail box. A week’s worth of flyers and bills were pressed tight and encircled by a large, bent Benefact Life envelope.
75.
AT THE DEALERSHIP, everything remained predictable. Keep busy, that’s what people said and Dad and I were both trying. But there isn’t much busy going on at a car dealership in the dead of winter and anyway, everybody else was in overdrive trying to take care of things and keep the chatter down. Most days, when I walked past Dad’s office on my way to the washroom, I’d see him staring at nothing. That’s when I’d forget about columns of numbers and I’d remember about Gord, and for the rest of the day I’d get even less of the nothing done that there was to do.
I left Gord’s life insurance papers in their envelope on the side table for more than a week. I didn’t know how these things went, what was appropriate, how soon would be too soon to talk about money. Finally, when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I went to my father’s office and closed the door. “Gord had life insurance—”
My father nodded. “We all do, it’s a group family plan. It covered the funeral expenses.” His eyes focused. “If there are outstanding bills, it can cover them. Just bring them to me.”
“No, this is from his work. An envelope came in the mail.”
“Oh. Bring it in tomorrow, I’ll take a look.”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday, Dad.” I didn’t admit I had it in the trunk of my car, that it had been riding with me for over a week.
“Right. Well bring it out to the house. Come for dinner. It would be good for your mother to see you.”
I hadn’t talked to Mom since she’d sent me away. Every day I asked about her, and Dad always said she was fine, but I knew she wasn’t. I knew she was eviscerated by grief—eviscerated is what Daneen, who called us both every few days, had told me.
After dinner, I laid the envelope face down on the kitchen table so Dad wouldn’t see the postmark. Next to him, Mom was looking out the window. She’d hugged me tight when I’d come through the door, smoothed the hair at my crown and asked how I was, and I’d clung to her hand for a long minute after that.
Dad slipped the papers out and scanned the first page. When he looked up, I couldn’t tell if he was surprised. “It says you’re the sole beneficiary, Meriel-Claire.”
“I know, but I have to tell you something.” For days I’d been weighing it, deciding whether to tell them about baby Justin. I’d been thinking about the balm he could be.
My mother sat back and fixed me with a stare. “Did you know about this? Is that why you were in such a hurry—”
My father said, “Doris” like a warning. If she heard it, she didn’t blink.
Dad didn’t read further. “Do you know how much you’ll receive?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t really read through it.”
“It won’t be much. He only worked there for a handful of months.”
“I know, but there’s something—” I wanted to ease into it, this news about Gord’s son.
My mother jangled the ice cubes in her gin and tonic, then stilled them with a guzzle. She pushed back from the table. “Gord obviously wanted you to have it. Now you do. I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
My father slid the papers toward me without turning a page. “Get in touch with them. It might be a nice little sum for doing something special. Think of it as—”
“My lucky break?” The words, my tone—a surprise to us all. I busied myself getting the papers back into their envelope while my parents wrapped themselves in necessary and unbearable silence. Finally we all agreed I should get home.
On the way, I stopped and bought a pack of cigarettes, but when I lit one in the parking lot, I could barely stand the bitter taste in my mouth. The suffocation of it.
Air didn’t come fully back to my lungs until I heard Darla’s voice on the answering machine. Darla, angry, berating Gord for not paying what he owed. In the background I could hear the baby, his single syllable complaints. Darla went on threatening a dead man until the baby began to wail.
I pulled the insurance papers out and read all the way through them for the first time. That’s when I saw it: one hundred thousand dollars. The figure, all those zeroes, near the bottom of page two.
Here, finally, was something I could do right.
I spent almost a month talking to the insurance people, telling them the same things over and over, pointing them to police reports and filling out forms and going over it again until finally, they agreed Gord’s death had been an accident. Then I went to a lawyer and I set up the trust—a hundred-thousand dollars set to pay out a little more each year until Justin turned eighteen. With interest, there’d be enough left over for his education.
It was easy to work out the money, much harder to compose the letter. I wanted it to say something about Gord, to capture some essential thing a little boy should know about his father, but all I had were facts—dates, hobbies, height. At the end of it, I wrote that Gord had wanted to be sure Justin was cared for. I included two pictures, one from when Gord was about four and one I’d taken in our apartment. He was laughing in both.
76.
THE INSURANCE PAYOUT was twice as much as I’d expected. Accidental death paid double and it was strange, the way I kept missing such crucial details.
Justin was already looked after by the intentional funds but the other half, this accidental half, belonged to no one. I opened a separate savings account and I buried it there.
I was twenty-four years old and it seemed like a fortune to me. I hadn’t earned it, I hadn’t asked for it and I couldn’t spend it. But it was all I had left of Gord, this sum he’d entrusted to me, so I knew I had to make it count for something.
77.
HE ARRIVED IN a city cab while I was covering reception. Through the window, I watched the big man lumber out of the backseat and wait, hands in his pockets, while the cab driver hauled a big suitcase from the trunk. Baggage tags blew like an ensign in the wind. I thought it must have cost an astronomical amount to take a cab out to Calder from the airport.
I didn’t recognize him and he didn’t recognize me. He just asked if Don was available. Dad stepped out of his office and stopped dead, like he’d walked into a pole and stunned himself.
Even after the man clasped both hands on Dad’s shoulders and said, “I came as soon as I heard. You know we’ve been in California for a few years. Jesus, Don, you could have got in touch,” I didn’t get who it was. It took an introduction, a moment of fog clearing, to understand why the façade of normal we’d been wearing for over a year, ever since we’d buried Gord, had melted right off my father.
Uncle Stewart was tall like Dad but much heavier. His stomach cascaded over his beltline; his round cheeks were scarlet. All that fat made it hard to see the family resemblance.
When I joined them in Calder for dinner the next night, Uncle Stewart’s flesh was the only loose thing in the house. It seemed everything else, especially Doris and Don, had been tightly bound with plastic wrap. Even the air was taut, and though Stewart tried to break through with the bottle of expensive scotch he pulled from his suitcase, nothing and no one breathed easy.
While my mother cut a store-bought pie, Stewart poured himself another stiff drink and leaned back in his chair. “It’s not getting better any time soon. You know that.” I thought at first he was talking about Gord, but no, he meant the economy. Earlier, he’d explained what he was doing in California, how the company he worked for had closed its Canadian office after the free-trade deal was signed. “I’ve accepted that I won’t be able to come back,” he’d said. “The opportunity’s all gone south.”
With a mouthful of pie, he looked from Dad to Mom. “We’ve all got to accept things, sooner or later.”
My mother put her fork down, her pie untouched. My father kept at his in silence, chewing in what seemed like deliberately slow motion. I regretted having said no to a piece. I needed something now to do with my hands, and I wasn’t about to reach for the scotch Stewart had set in the centre of the table.
Stewart shook his head vigorously and a bit of flaky crust flew from his cheek. “Jesus, neither of us with a son now to even pass the business on to. Pop must be spinning in his grave.” Mom and I stood simultaneously and started gathering the plates. Stewart said, “So I guess that’s that then. It’s done.”
I thought he meant supper.
Two days later, Stewart came to the dealership on his way to the airport. This time he just walked straight into Dad’s office, and after a few minutes my father got up and closed his door. They were in there almost an hour, and when they came out they shook hands solemnly. Then Stewart asked me to call a cab and he waited outside. Dad went back to his office and shut the door again.
78.
DANEEN TOLD ME she was sending a copy of her book. I gave her the address for Elgin & Son, thinking it wouldn’t fit in the small mailbox in the lobby of my apartment building. I was imagining the books my parents used to get from Reader’s Digest in their fat cardboard cartons, but Hidden Bargains was surprisingly thin, its cover soft and sleek as I slid it from the manila envelope.
Daneen hadn’t told me anything about it when she called to say it was off to print, only that some people were excited about it. She mentioned them all by name so I knew I should be impressed, that these were people who knew about such things. The next time I’d heard from Daneen was in a postcard: Springtime in Paris—such a wonderful place to get married! Yesterday! Love D&B. My parents got a different card with the exact same message penned across the back.
She’d changed her name, which surprised me. The wedding must have been planned because even the book cover said Daneen DeCario. And that’s what she’d signed on the title page, too, the double-Ds oversized, the o trailing off into a little flourish.
I read the whole novel in one go, late into the night. Hidden Bargains was about a fucked-up family in a small prairie town and I don’t know why I hadn’t expected that. So much of it so familiar: the sunken living room, the landscape outside the windows, the way my mother wore her hair. And the favoured son—a drunk, always screwing up, losing his temper, falling into despair.
She’d painted my mother as sympathetic, of course, turning even her devotion to appearances into a fierce instinct to protect her home. But she’d depicted Dad as cold, stingy to the point of cruelty. The only glue holding the couple together in the pages of her book was their sexual insatiability. Orgies—it was completely ridiculous, the whole premise of that small town sex club. And worse, she’d created an all-seeing youngest daughter who peeped through broken vinyl blinds.
That young daughter, the narrator, was the only made-up person in the whole book. There was another character, a minor character, a silent middle daughter so much duller than the clever and captivating protagonist. She saw it all, that little sister, saw right through to the moral bankruptcy. The family’s façade crumbled around that smart, serene narrator but her voice never wavered as she marched us toward the brother’s death.
A suicide made to look like an accident—I doubled over, reading that part—and then the falling away of all the masks.
My heart was hammering but I couldn’t stop reading. I needed to know what happened. I didn’t getmuch relief. In the end, Daneen left us all wallowing in the shallow grave of our badly lived lives.
I went to bed with my blood still charging. I had to keep turning over, keep sucking breath into my too-tight chest.
79.
DANEEN ALSO SENT a copy to my mother. Some nasty thing in me found that exhilarating—that Mom would turn the pages and see so much revealed—but then dread took over. I knew I’d take the blame for not having protected the family from Daneen’s savage pen, for letting her in the door in the first place.
But I couldn’t avoid speaking to Mom forever. I was barely in the door on Father’s Day when she launched, not even a hello. “I just loved Daneen’s book!”
I decided to hang my jacket in the front closet. She followed me down the hall, something she only ever did when she was determined to make her point. “Didn’t you?”
I half nodded, half shrugged, a time-tested manoeuvre to concede a point without seeming conciliatory. Doris both craved and despised conciliation.
“That girl has such talent, the way she takes you right inside a room, right inside people’s heads.” I agreed, this time unequivocally, but Mom stayed hot on my heels.
In the kitchen, she picked up a spatula like she had something to flip though nothing was cooking. She tapped it lightly against her palm. Finally: “I know her family has a lot of issues”—she turned the word down low so it took on extra weight—“and I’m sure some of it must be fictionalized, but I can’t help wonder how her parents feel about being exposed like that.”
80.
FOR MONTHS FOLLOWING Uncle Stewart’s visit, Dad’s office door was closed more than usual. One afternoon he opened his door, came across to my office and said, “Let’s go for a drive.”
It was late September, years since our last drive together and yet, after a few miles of bland talk about my work at the dealership and career stepping-stones, I relaxed. I was learning to ride along, to just be there, as pleasant and helpful as I could be. Dad turned off the highway and headed down along the Auberge River where the road narrowed and wound. The trees had changed to yellow; big cottonwood leaves drifted onto the banks.
Dad took a deep breath. “The dealership has been sold.”
Not “I’ve sold” or “We’ve sold,” just “has been,” as if it was completely out of his control. “I’ll tell the rest of the staff tomorrow. It changes hands at the end of the year.”
I let my fingers and my face ask the questions I couldn’t form on my tongue.
“Stewart wanted to cash out. I wasn’t prepared to bury myself in debt to buy him out.”
“Dad, no—” I thought of Gord’s money, sitting hidden, idle. “Is it too late?”
Dad slowed and studied me. “It’s all done, yes. I’ve been thinking of this as an opportunity. For both of us.”
He gave me a faint smile. “Of course your mother is thrilled. She’s looking forward to a long retirement.” He accelerated into a curve, added, “I’d like you to stay on until the end, if you can. But you’ll need to start looking for something else.”
