The year I started junior high, I played ringette on Wednesday nights. One of those nights my father told me we had a stop to make before going home. He said he was painting the guest room of Madame Lavoie, a friend of one of my father’s colleagues at the credit union. The painter she’d hired had torn his shoulder and she’d been asking around for recommendations. My father’s colleague did not recommend my father. My father was not a painter. But, the forty-minute detour across town to Madame Lavoie’s house, where I waited in the car as he measured the walls and determined how many paint cans she’d need, didn’t surprise me. My father had started offering his help to others, not the poor and destitute, more like Madame Lavoie or the cashier at Mr. Grocer, whose brother needed someone with a minivan to pick up a headboard, or our neighbour Arthur, whose unkillable yew shrubs my father took it upon himself to wrap in burlap for winter. I heard my parents one evening discussing these after-work “jobs,” the mystification in my mother’s voice, my father’s stilted answers.
“You’ve never so much as painted a bowl,” my mother said.
“That is true.”
“But you’re painting other people’s houses?”
“It seems so.”
Then, there was the time my father’s hulking presence filled my bedroom doorway one Saturday morning before we left for my piano lesson. He suggested I bring a book because we were stopping by the hospital first, to visit my grandfather. We circled the hospital parking lot for twenty minutes looking for a free spot, but my father didn’t get irritated. Normally, he’d have tensed up in his shoulders and cursed into the rearview mirror. Instead, he drove around and chuckled when a parking space appeared that he’d missed, before he wiped away tears. He’d started doing this, laughing quietly at unfunny things, then crying, presumably from joy.
Looking back at that time, I see now that there were other subtle changes. He gave up hot sauce and cheese fries. He fit into the Brooks Brothers suit that he’d worn to his school graduation; my mother sighed and said it wasn’t fair. He no longer wore the same shirt three days in a row, rubbing his stick of deodorant directly on the fabric to buy him another day. He took public transit to work and changed up the route, preferring to walk unfamiliar roads. He started saying, though not often or intensely, that we were all universal energy.
After a nurse let us into the cancer ward, I tried to keep up with my father’s long strides. He wanted to be present when my grandfather died, so he could guide him into the next realm. I didn’t ask how my father knew how to do this. He had with him the little book he kept in his shirt pocket.
In the shadowy inside of the hospital room, I could make out my grandfather in the bed, his face hollowed at the cheeks and yellow from jaundice, made an even more garish colour by the contrast with the white sheet pulled to his chin. I sat on a chair on one side of the bed. My father, who had visited every day for weeks, took the seat on the other side. I didn’t know how long we were going to be staying, but it seemed inappropriate to start reading my Sweet Valley High book. My father began to breathe deeply and slowly as if trying to set a communal pace in the room, like we were all breathing toward death. He read a few words from his pocket book. When he paused between the words, he looked at the opposite wall, as if my grandfather’s spirit might waft across it.
I don’t remember exactly what my father read from the pocket book. I remember feeling shivers up my neck from the soft way he said, “human consciousness.” Although it was possible that energy could find its way back into another life, the central point I remembered was that my grandfather wouldn’t come back. There seemed to be no mention of an afterlife or ghosts or “we’ll see you again” in the pocket book.
When my grandfather turned onto his side, toward me, my father laid down his book and stood up. He reached over and placed his hand an inch over my grandfather’s mouth to feel his breath. After that, my father sat down and resumed reading.
There was a mirror on the table next to my grandfather’s bed. I saw my attempt at French braids and the necklace I’d chosen that morning, a thin gold chain with my birthstone. On the table were photos. My grandmother Penny who’d died before I was born, photos of my father with his brother Ted, a recent photo from Thanksgiving of all the grandchildren squished together on an apple cart. It was inside a frame shaped like a heart that my mother had sent to all of the family.
After about half an hour, my father left to get us something to drink from the cafeteria. While he was gone, a nurse came in and removed my grandfather’s diaper and wiped his privates on both sides with a wet towel. She didn’t notice me until she was halfway done and when she did, she said, “This one can get spritely.” Because the urine had leaked into the bedsheet, the nurse rolled my grandfather all the way up to the bedrail and tucked the dirty sheet underneath him and slid in a new one. The nurse left him there on his side facing me and left.
It was silent in the room, so quiet I could hear my grandfather’s watch ticking on the side table.
“Cherub,” he whispered.
I wasn’t sure if I’d heard correctly. He used to call me that but maybe he meant something else. I considered running out and looking for my father, but my grandfather spoke again and this time with his eyes open.
“It’s a lot of pressure,” he whispered.
“Is something hurting?” I looked around his bed for the button to call in a nurse.
He tried to shake his head. “It’s too much.”
“Are you in pain?”
He swallowed hard. “I’m not going anytime soon.”
“Yes,” I said, encouragingly, to which he closed his eyes and seemed to scrunch them tightly.
“He’s always here,” he said opening his eyes again.
I didn’t pass on the information to my father, who continued to sit at my grandfather’s bedside most afternoons. My father, who didn’t ask for anything. Who didn’t complain, even when my ringette game was two hours away and I lost my contact lens on the dressing room floor and couldn’t play. My father, who said he was trying to better himself on the road to enlightenment. Looking back, I see how it was strange that he talked to me about the road to enlightenment, planes of consciousness and karmic payloads. I didn’t doubt that there was such a road. I took it literally; he was on it and because I was with him so much in the car, so was I.
That Christmas we waited for my father to join us for breakfast.
“Bryce, the pancakes are ready!” my mother called down to the basement.
My older brother Daniel and I were already sitting at the table.
“Bryce!”
My father didn’t call back. We knew he wouldn’t. By then he didn’t yell, not for anything.
“Can one of you tell him we’re ready to eat?” she said.
I walked downstairs to the laundry nook where my brother kept the bench press my mother had spotted at a garage sale. My father sat on it when he read his pocket book, meditated or waited for his pants to dry.
He was sitting there, in his underwear, eyes closed.
“Are you coming up for breakfast?” I said.
“I’ve decided this is where I’ll be today,” he said, opening his eyes.
“Do you still want your presents?”
It looked like he was thinking it over. “You can bring them down here if you want.”
“Uncle Patrick and Aunt Rose are coming later. Will you be upstairs when they get here?”
There was a time when my father looked like he was following along with Uncle Pat’s stories about Pat’s boss who Pat wanted to strangle. My father even joined Pat with a beer or two. They went golfing once, which made my mother ecstatic. One time when my mother asked them to pick up bags of ice for a make-your-own sushi lunch, my father was forced to intervene to stop Pat from brawling with a customer in the same line-up. He wasn’t happy to be put in that situation. As a teenager, my father had fought in one brawl, during which he’d broken a boy’s eye socket without trying and for hardly any provocation. After that, he stayed away from any more scuffles. I learned this years later from my father’s younger brother, my Uncle Ted. My father had a quick fuse, like his father, who took it out on everyone around him, including his wife and two sons, but mostly on my father. After I heard that I understood why he stayed in the background at family gatherings. It also made sense why he’d found the pocket book. By the time my father gave up Christmas, there was more to be angry about; my mother’s early-onset arthritis, Daniel’s persisting rebellious streak, the patchy roof we couldn’t afford to replace.
“I’ll be down here today,” my father said.
“Even for dinner when Mom serves her hot apple crumble?” I could go on and he wouldn’t tell me to stop.
“You can come down and talk if you want.”
I knew he’d listen to whatever I said without interrupting me; even if I made deliberate pauses, he wouldn’t speak.
We spent Christmas dinner listening to my uncle Pat complain about my father.
“Why can’t my brother-in-law show his face? Is it so hard to come up here and wish us a Merry Christmas?”
“He’s not angry with you,” my mother whispered, trying to bring down the volume. “He’s detached.”
“Detached?” yelled Uncle Pat.
“He tried to explain it to me,” my mother said, her eyes clouding over in confusion. “There’s a book.”
“A book?”
“I want someone to tell me what it means,” my mother said, standing to clear the dishes. “Bryce says it’s not up to him.”
“What the hell?” said Pat, his voice rising even louder. “Where am I right now?”
“He thinks I’m angry,” my mother yelled back, seeming to have thrown in the towel on staying calm, in the hope that two people yelling along with the darkening sky and the end of Christmas descending would bring my father upstairs.
My father sometimes went to a place called the Polaris Centre to hear talks given by healers and spiritualists passing through town. He went by himself, but always came home with something from the gift shop: a beaded bookmark, a “Choose Joy” penguin fridge magnet. I have to think he was trying to make the Polaris Centre more normal for my mother. I must’ve wondered how they were going to stay together when my father did everything asked of him without complaint, when there was no way for my mother to justify the frustration she felt. I became used to the confusion in her face and no longer looked to her to make sense of what was happening to him. His dog-eared pocket book, I avoided. I imagined his little book had the power to convince anyone of anything. If my father could give up Christmas, what might I abandon?
One Saturday morning early in the new year, my father took me to the Polaris Centre to help him set up an event. My mother had left to take Daniel to get his broken retainer repaired at a dental clinic and I wasn’t allowed to stay at home alone. When I seemed less than thrilled, my father told me it wouldn’t be for long and I might enjoy perusing the gift shop. I brought what was left of my Christmas money and sat in the front seat of our minivan looking out the window at the world that I knew. Every two blocks was a stop sign or a faded crosswalk. A park with a dog run lay to the north of the neighborhood and a concrete wall ran alongside the southern edge, hiding the expressway downtown. My father no longer heard the screeching brakes near Dead Man’s Curve, or sniffed the orange smog that collected over the ravine. We drove for a while under highway bridges. A long stretch of snow-covered fields followed before we pulled up to a plaza.
We walked to the back of the gift shop where a black curtain revealed a small studio space. I could see tables pushed together through the opening. On an easel was a sign, “Meet and greet with Mr. David Wallington.”
The walls and floor were black. Rows of subdued track lighting hung from the ceilings. Dust rose in columns toward the lights, and I thought of the children’s theatre, where I’d refused to pretend I was walking over clouds.
A bald man about the same age as my father was quietly stacking chairs. A woman, who looked like my math teacher Ms. Dumontet, unfolded a tablecloth like it was gold leaf. In the middle of the room stood a second, very tall man. He wore an ochre shirt and a brown tie and brown pants. His hair lifted as he turned toward my father with an appreciative nod. He was the man whose picture was on the back of my father’s pocket book.
I helped the woman spread the tablecloth over the table. She told me her name was Nancy, and I told her my name was Amanda, and that was all we said. The only sound was the squeaking of the Styrofoam cups my father was removing from their column. He covered the table in cups, far more than the number of people entering the studio. Then, he reached under and pulled out a round plastic container. It held a black forest cake with syrupy cherries that stuck to the lid.
“Is he giving a talk?” I asked, looking over at the tall man. I was worried I’d have to stay and listen now that we’d almost finished setting up.
“People come to ask him questions,” my father said, appraising the table, as Nancy tried to find a place to fit the plates. “There are no stupid questions.”
I nodded because that’s what Ms. Dumontet said at the start of the year, but my father must’ve mistaken my nod for interest. He took my arm and walked me over to the group gathered around Mr. Wallington. Among the adults was a boy, age eleven or twelve. I thought it was better to listen rather than play with the boy as my father might suggest.
The bald man was in the middle of speaking. His voice was hushed, but no one seemed to need to lean in. “Is the struggle ever over?”
My father closed his eyes in agreement, while others nodded.
Emboldened, the man continued, “I must ask you Mr. Wallington because I’m curious. What is the hardest challenge left in your life?”
Mr. Wallington answered without pause, as if he was used to the question. “When I am overwhelmed by despair.”
His voice was a deep, even timbre, despite the dramatic nature of his words. He had a slight Newfoundland accent like my neighbor Arthur, who grew tomatoes and squash on the roof of his carport. Mr. Wallington turned next to my father.
My father said, “If others want to go next, I can wait.”
I didn’t want to hear my father’s question. I was growing dizzy in the half dark of the studio. Someone asked a question about the law of harmonics. I looked for a bathroom sign or an exit but the curtain was pulled so tightly shut that I couldn’t make out the opening.
“Anyone else?” said Mr. Wallington.
The boy raised his hand. He wore grey cotton pants with belt loops, like from a school uniform.
“Please go ahead,” said Mr. Wallington, unfazed by the boy’s presence.
“How many chances are you supposed to give a person?” the boy asked.
I peered at him to check if he was older than he’d seemed at first glance. He didn’t appear to be with anyone. Most of the others had wandered off to the refreshment table.
“Can you say more?”
“My dad makes me feel bad. He makes me suffer. Should I stop seeing him?”
I wondered why the boy used the word “suffer” and not “mad” or “sad.” I thought he was trying to sound older so he’d be taken seriously.
Mr. Wallington turned from the boy and looked at the people gathered around, which by this time was just me, my father, and the woman who looked like my math teacher.
“Look more deeply,” he said.
The boy stared hard at Mr. Wallington’s mouth. “What should I do?”
“You cannot remove your father from you.” Mr. Wallington pointed to his chest. “Help him transform inside of you.”
The boy shifted in his boots. My math teacher look-alike was fidgeting too, fumbling around in her purse. My father alone stood tall and poised. I tried to take in his composure, his serene smile, as if the boy’s unlikely presence at the Polaris Centre and what his father did to him were not enormous questions.
As my father turned to Mr. Wallington, ready to ask his question, the boy walked away, his pants bunched up over the rim of his boots. I watched as he picked his winter coat off the ground and a knapsack that seemed to hold nothing. Before he reached the curtain, he turned around, as if checking that he hadn’t left anything behind. I wanted to think his mother was waiting for him in the parking lot, letting him be brave.
My father appeared with a tray of cake slices cut too big to manage without a plate, or fork. He sauntered around holding the tray in front. I stayed close to him, feeling the light polyester of his shirt graze my arm and his slow, even saunter. In my confusion, I tried to smile peacefully like my father was doing, what he said was useful, especially on planes and in long elevator rides and during office blackouts, to rebalance the negativity. He strode out of the studio, beyond the curtain, to offer a piece of cake to the sales clerk and the boy, who was approaching the door. The boy didn’t take it right away. I could tell he didn’t want to. My father continued to hold out the tray until the boy made a small, high-pitched sound like he was grateful or surprised, and rolled the slice onto his mitten.
Not long after that, from inside our parked car, I saw the boy standing in the bus stop shelter. He looked so serious, despite the fact that his wool hat covered half his eyes. As we drove out of the parking lot, my father commentated on the lightness of the snowflakes, the lightest he’d seen. I told myself there was a good reason he didn’t stop the car and ask the boy if he was alright, or if he needed a drive. It would’ve been difficult to see the boy inside the bus shelter, especially at dusk. My father would’ve been busy with his questions, his journey; what the pocketbook called “the prominence of the highly personal path.” We drove on, toward the city limits. The streets were empty except for a few cars. I looked outside at the snow, not swirling in a frenzy, but tumbling across the sky, each piece slow and distinct, folding back into the dark.
My father, who is now sixty-five, looks closer to my age. I can’t remember when, if ever, he was sick. He calls me once a month, or I call him. Often, when I call, he says that he was just about to call me.
He tells me about Uncle Ted, who has ALS and whom my father drives to medical appointments. He doesn’t know that Uncle Ted calls him “goddam Jesus.” His second cousin Hilda, who’s obese, needs regular help getting around her house. He’s replaced her hot water tank and half of her main stack with the help of YouTube videos. When I tell him it must be tough for Hilda to be immobile, he pauses and says, “Life is beautiful,” and I want to tell him, “Fuck off.”
He asks about my six-year-old son Anthony and my husband Ryan. I no longer tell him about Anthony’s epilepsy, which is basically all I think about. I don’t tell him how I hide in my office in the evenings once Anthony is asleep, avoiding Ryan and any other sign of human life, my nerves shot and resources drained. Language has dried up between me and my father on an increasing number of subjects. I tell him I try and go on a morning walk.
“What else?” he says, and I can hear disinterest in his voice.
I tell him about a yoga retreat I went on with some women from work, how I managed to go a full day without speaking. “It’s harder than you think,” I say.
My father laughs, as I expected, as if he knows only too well. “Keep trying,” he says.
I don’t know what else to say. I know I won’t keep trying.
“There is much to gain by reaching a higher plane.”
I tell myself he gave my mother the house and all the furniture. He took for himself a Japanese roll-up bed. He helped move my stuff to university and stayed at the hospital in Saint Jerome trying to speak French with the nurse when I broke my collarbone on a ski trip. I tell myself he isn’t violent. He never hurt anybody. He didn’t put back in the world the violence he experienced from his father. I remind myself it could’ve been much worse.
I no longer have the copy of the pocket book he gave me when I turned sixteen. On Mr. Wallington’s dust-jacket photo, I made him cross-eyed and doodled a scratchy black moustache on his upper lip. Back then, I thought the words in the book gelled together into a clump. So many adjectives and abstract nouns. I still think this, which is why it’s strange that when I’m at a loss, or in a stretch of melancholy, I get out the pocket book. It’s the fourth edition hardcover my father gave me after Anthony was born. I find I’m looking at it more than usual lately. Maybe it’s like the Bible in other homes, a family reference offering the possibility of relief despite my skepticism. I open the book to a random page. I close my eyes and touch down and read the line closest to my fingertip. Maybe, I’m hoping the words will reveal something to me, something clarifying; what that is, I’m not sure.
One night last week, my father called to tell me that the Polaris Centre was closing. I was sitting in my office, the pocket book on the shelf near my desk. He talked about his years of service there; the group meditation where he drifted asleep and fell off his chair, the American woman who led a workshop on singing bowls. He spoke about the events he’d worked, the craft and embroidery sales, the book readings.
I told him I remembered the boy from the time we helped set up a meet-and-greet. “Why didn’t someone call his mother?”
My father paused. “If I remember correctly, Mr. Wallington helped. He talked to the boy with respect.”
“That boy was the same age as me,” I said, reaching for the pocket book and flipping it over to Mr. Wallington’s photograph, his hair now a thick silver crop. “He took the bus all the way out there.”
“Yes, I remember,” my father said.
“He had to be desperate for help to do that.”
My father paused, and when he next spoke, his voice was gentle and unrushed. “You can’t care too much,” he said, quoting a line from the pocket book.
My father slept better than I did. He never said an unkind word about anybody.
“You gave him a slice of cake,” I said, drawing a small tear under Mr. Wallington’s eye.
“That’s right,” he said. “He liked that didn’t he?”
The boy had cupped the cake with his wool mittens. As he grasped at the piece, causing it to crumble, my father turned back toward the curtain. He didn’t see the cake fall to the floor, or the boy reach out, as if trying to catch the air.
_____________________
Natalie Southworth is a UK-born writer now living in Montreal. Her fiction has appeared in The Moth Magazine, Canadian Notes & Queries, The New Quarterly, Grain Magazine, Prairie Fire, The Dalhousie Review and elsewhere. Her stories were finalists for several prominent international literary awards and winners of The Moth Magazine short story contest and the Brighton Short Story Prize. Natalie holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. She is at work on a novel with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.
Irwin Freeman is a US-based artist who has exhibited reclamation-themed sculpture at museums in Phoenix, Santa Barbara, Providence, Hattiesburg.