Notes Towards Recovery

by Louise Ells

  “Yeah,” he said. “In July when the water’s not so frickin’ cold.” We laughed and he lay out on the rock, palms down, pulling warmth from the stone. “Hey.” His inflection made it clear it was a question.

  “Yeah?”

  “Just want you to know, I’m not gonna hang out with Stephen this summer. And that girl is a lousy paddler.”

  It must have been the sweetest thing he could think to say, and I loved him for it.

  “You are the most awesome eleven year old I know,” I said. “And my best brother ever.”

  “I’m the only eleven year old you know. And the only brother you’ve got.” He flicked my arm, grinned again.

  We sat for a while, then made our way back to our lake and back to our island and our cottage, neither of us in any great hurry. My contentment was broken by two things. Stephen and his girlfriend canoeing along the shore. She called out in a really friendly voice, but neither Peter nor I replied. And Betty James standing on the dock chatting to Dad when we pulled up. Did I imagine they both seemed flustered by our arrival?

  “Oh my,” said Betty. “Your hair is wet, Peter.”

  “He wins for first swim of the year,” I announced.

  “Oh my,” she said again. “Well, I must be off. See you tomorrow for the feast. Bob. Kids.”

  “Bob. Kids,” Peter mimicked as we walked into the cottage.

  After lunch when we pulled the wishbone, Peter snapped off the longest piece and won. Again. He’s a boy, he’s stronger than you, said our mother. Subtext: he’ll always be stronger than you, get used to it.

  But that evening, when he was blowing eggs to decorate, and Mum was trying to act as if she wasn’t already hiding chocolate for the next morning, and Dad was pouring himself another drink and wondering out loud if we should leave right after breakfast on Monday to avoid the worst of the traffic, and I was trying to remember what homework I absolutely had to have done for school on Tuesday, and if it had been unfair of me to tell Peter about Dad and Betty James, his heart stopped.

  He dropped the egg he’d been working on and it fell to the floor, cracked, yolk splattering on to a strip of my ankles, bare between tennis socks and jeans. “Oh for-” I started to complain, but then Peter hit the ground, smacking the floor, not moving, making no sound.

  Mum screamed, but even as she was screaming, she lifted him and carried him, running, down the path to the dock. We followed behind, grabbing paddles, getting into the canoe, pushing off. And as Mum held Peter, Dad and I paddled towards the landing, the car, the phone box, the road. I remember moving the entire lake with each stroke, pushing it behind me, away from me, with such strength that the four of us skimmed across the water’s surface. I recited the Lord’s Prayer under my breath; it was the only one I knew.

  Stephen’s parents pulled alongside us in their motorboat and Dad told me to throw them our line and they towed us, too quickly for the canoe; it split in half as we reached the landing and Dad was soaked to his chest. Then the Jameses caught up, yelled at us to just start driving, they’d call the hospital. I suppose they took care of our busted canoe. And maybe it was Betty who righted Pete’s chair, cleaned the broken egg from the floor, tidied away the chocolate rabbits and eggs in their obscenely bright foil.

  There was no ambulance in those days and the nearest hospital was thirteen miles away. It was too late when we arrived. (It had, of course, been too late when we left.) A dickey heart, the doctor said. I remember that, dickey. A dickey heart. Undetected his whole life. A winter of hockey had probably weakened it, but it was impossible to know for sure.

  My parents weren’t like Brent’s. They couldn’t pretend there was any hope Peter was going to come home. My brother was going to be dead for the rest of our lives, from that Saturday until we were all gone and there was no one left to remember him. My mother tried to spend Victoria Day weekend at the cottage, but she couldn’t. We arrived on Friday evening with a brand new canoe. All night I heard her crying, and in the morning she packed up a few of Peter’s things to take home with her, and we left.

  She said she’d try again when it was warmer, but as July first weekend approached she shook her head no, told Dad and I to go up ourselves, she needed more time, and needed this weekend to herself. Funny how little I remember. We would have gone to the buffet dinner at the Lodge, watched their fireworks display. Stephen was single again but I barely spoke to him when he stopped at our cottage and offered condolences, told me that he missed Pete too. After ten minutes of what must have been uncomfortable silence for him, he left. I believe Betty James came by as well and also left soon afterwards.

  We should go home, I said to Dad, and he nodded. First thing in the morning he said. Then he sighed. Your mother and I have been thinking. Maybe we should sell this place. Sell it, I echoed, already adjusted to the idea. But not if you don’t want us to, he said quickly. It’s yours too, part of your history, and maybe you’ll want to bring your children here. No need to decide anything just yet. I excused myself to go to the privy where I sobbed into a musty roll of toilet paper.

  The next morning felt like my last chance. I crept out of the cottage in my swimsuit and took the canoe when the mist was rising from the lake and fish were jumping for flies. I walked the spider-webbed portage, paddled the short distance to the jumping rock, and clambered up onto the platform, planning to run and jump before I could change my mind. But I hesitated, reached the edge and stopped. I imagined I could hear Peter teasing me, calling me chicken. I sat, then, and thought of the force of the glacier that had moved this boulder, of humans being sacrificed in underground cenotes, of the second last one being the winner. As if there could ever be a winner.

  I don’t remember any more discussion about keeping the cottage for my future children. I can’t remember if it was sold before, or during, the divorce. It wasn’t Betty James, but another woman Dad moved in with, and it was seven years before I returned to Muskoka. An August long weekend visiting a university friend’s cottage; I was too close not to detour on the way home, and rent a battered canoe from the Lodge. I didn’t paddle to the island to look at Lee’s Word, but searched instead for the entrance to the portage. When I reached what I’d always pictured as a small lake, I discovered it had been claimed by beavers and was barely more than a pond. The Jumping Rock seemed taller, and much more dangerous - how had none of the kids hit one of the many rocks jutting from the water’s surface? But I gauged the safest place to enter and this time I didn’t stop, didn’t hesitate.

  So deep, so quickly. It was a shock - the bitter water, the dense waterweed - and I panicked, opening my eyes. In the dark I saw the suggestion of faces. As soon as I felt mud between my toes I pushed up, up back through the gritty, cold, water, gasping and choking.

  I dragged myself to the edge, up onto the rock where we had sat that March morning. For several minutes, I focused only on breathing. Then I lay, palms down, just as Peter had done. The rock was cold, I continued shivering, and I cried out loud.

  I took a job in Nova Scotia, where no one knew I’d once had a younger brother. Here, nor’easters are common. The sea never freezes, of course, but some winter evenings when I stand motionless I hear what Brent’s mother must have heard: a moaning, from a great distance, far beneath the whitecaps.

  Melting

  That was the summer it didn’t rain. By mid-June the corn was stunted and the hay was withering; on a breezy day my mother’s laundry was coated with gritty red dust when she brought it in from the line. Old timers argued about the last time the river had been so low, and I watched streams fold in on themselves then disappear.

  That was also the summer that Frank Tooley got it into his head to run a bus tour round our township. The previous year he’d convinced his Dad to try some new British beer, so he could enter a contest Brewers Retail was holding. He’d hoped for a dirt bike but instead won the Grand Prize of an all-expenses-paid trip to England. When he came back to school in the fall he wrote a speech for the Legion’s
public speaking contest about tourists, himself included, who were foolish enough to pay good money to sit on a coach and be told stories about things they couldn’t see. “An empty field where perhaps a Roman Fort once stood. A wood where Henry the Eighth might have had a hunting lodge. A mound of earth that could have been a prehistoric Neolithic long barrow.” His deadpan delivery had us all - judges too - in fits of laughter and I believe he went as far as the provincial finals.

  He was a Bushie, Frank Tooley, all Valley slang and his brothers’ hand-me-down hunter orange clothes, and he lived three miles out the wrong side of town. Neither a farmer nor a townie, he was destined for community college rather than university by dint of his father’s alcoholism. Streamed through ‘Technical’ which meant auto mechanics, woodworking and plumbing, he and I hadn’t been in a class together since grade school. But ours was a small city, only forty-three students in our year; we all knew each other.

  He bought an old factory bus, one of the narrow double-decker ones that used to take workers to the mill back in the ‘fifties when Robillard Pulp and Paper owned the town. He fixed it up, painted it bright green, wrote ‘Landscapes of Our Past’ on the side and ran his excursion with the same combination of cheekiness and good looks that had won him a position on the Student Council (with his promises to replace the hall water fountains with lemonade and change the mascot from a goose to a tiger so we could start winning some ball games). He nailed it; I guess pretty much every tourist passing through on their way up north, heading towards Algonquin Park, their cottages, and the scattered museums and attractions I was paid to promote, must have bought a ticket and taken a seat on his bus.

  I took it first at the start of the summer break when I still clung to the promise a new beginning holds. I’d applied too late to join my best friend, Sally, on the bypass construction crew where she worked as a flag girl earning three times the minimum wage. Instead I was manning the so-called Tourist Information Bureau, a desk shoved into a corner of the town hall’s lobby. I figured it would be one of my duties to be able to speak knowledgeably about the bus tour when asked, but Sally and I sat at the back and whispered through much of Frank’s commentary. Sally worked out how much money she was going to have saved by Labour Day and I worried that Aunt Lori had picked my younger sister to travel through Europe with her because I was too boring. You didn’t have to come from the edge of town or wear hand me downs - there were other reasons not to fit in.

  Sally tried to reassure me, but I knew. Not from Deborah’s hastily scrawled postcards - so much left unsaid that I could only imagine sidewalk cafés, skimpy bikinis, midnight dinners at jazz bars - but because I had watched my baby sister grow up and away from me. Only thirteen months apart, when we were children we’d delighted in strangers mistaking us for twins. Now the differences between us could easily convince people we weren’t related. While I was nervous and shy and worked at the art of being unnoticed, Deborah flaunted her quirks and became exotic, popular. She had, of course, been the correct choice for a European odyssey with my Bohemian Aunt. I would have fussed about ordering museum tickets in advance, looking up train schedules, buying a phrase book for each county on the itinerary. Deborah and Aunt Lori claimed they had no plan, said they were making it up as they went along.

  There was a booklet I sold for a dime which mapped all the town’s points of interest: This is where the famous fire of 1918 started. Here’s where the first settler squatted on land that he later bought from its rightful owner. There’s the jail, with its original 1867 cell. There’s where the last public hanging was held. But Frank Tooley was a storyteller, with no qualms about embellishing what meagre facts he had. After he’d done a circuit round the town giving details about the sites not found in any of the literature I had on display, he drove over the bridge into Quebec and down a dirt road, pointing out the entrance to the caves “where Jesuit priests over-wintered, kept alive by their moonshine,” and the “magic rapids” that appeared for one week every seventh spring, and turtleshead portage. This, he insisted, was named not after the flowers that grew there but two Hudson’s Bay traders who fell asleep by their campfire and swore their bags of furs were stolen by giant turtles.

  For the duration of the ride Sally teased me, claiming that Frank was putting on a special show for me. I shook my head, denying the possibility he was flirting, in awe of his self-confidence. For the passengers on his bus tour he played up his local roots, “that’s one jeezly big Cathedral,” he said, “but inside it’s finer ‘n frog hair.”

  Sally and I got off the bus and walked along the street arm in arm to her back yard, where her mother served us lemonade. We slathered our faces with baby oil to help tan our winter-white skin as suggested by one of Sally’s teen magazines, and gossiped.

  “Aileen McIntyre got a car,” said Sally.

  Aileen McIntyre. The coolest girl in High School. Remarkably, she and Deborah had become friends the previous year. I’d seen them giggling in corners of the school usually reserved for couples, walking shoulder-to-shoulder between classes, and Aileen had even been to our house for dinner a few times last fall. But something must have happened; after March Break I rarely even saw them at each others’ lockers.

  “Apparently it was a gift from her Dad for getting straight-A’s.”

  When I took my straight-A report card home my parents had been pleased, but it was no less than they’d expected. My father, the high school principal, quipped that I took after him, but his joke fell a little flat because the unspoken corollary I heard was that if I was the brains, Deborah was the beauty. That my sister was gorgeous was a fact not even Sally could pretend away.

  “I’m thinking of Med School,” I said to Sally, and listed the universities I was going to apply to in the fall, hoping her list and mine might overlap.

  “I’m thinking of an MRS degree.” She laughed. “Seriously, Kathleen. School’s out. I don’t even want to think about it. I heard rumours about the bands that are coming for Summerfest.”

  Best friend though she was, there was some things I never told Sally, like that winter afternoon when I had arrived home from school, seen Dad’s car in the driveway hours before he was due home, and no one had heard me come through the basement entryway. My mother and Deborah were shouting at each other with words so angry I couldn’t translate them and in a moment of silence I heard a sound I’d never heard before: my father was crying. I stood motionless, then carefully re-opened the door and let it slam shut. “Hello,” I’d called out, banging my boots as if to rid them of snow.

  Mum had rushed downstairs, her cheeks pink. “Don’t take your coat off, Kath,” she’d said. “I have some errands to run uptown, come with me.”

  It was the only time she’d ever called me anything other than Kathleen. She hated nicknames and Kathy and Debbie were not allowed in our house, any more than alcohol, meat or caffeine. “If we had wanted to name our daughters Kathy and Debbie then we would have done so,” she’d informed my first grade teacher in a tone that, at the time, made me squirm with embarrassment. Later it would fill me with pride.

  We got into the car and drove along the length of Main Street. Finally I asked where we were headed. My mother shrugged, then swung the car to the right and out to the highway. “Why don’t we have supper, just the two of us?”

  “On a school night?”

  “Two years from now you’ll be off at university. Just once I’d love to have dinner with my sensible grown up daughter, just her and I. How about the Swiss restaurant? I’ve never been there.”

  For good reason, I thought. The cuisine comprised pork, veal and cheese. I assumed we’d leave as soon as she had looked through the menu, heavy as a book with a faux leather cover and each page coated with thick plastic. Instead she asked the waitress for a jug of ice water while we made up our minds.

  She leaned across the table. “I’m sure they don’t use rennet cheeses, you could try the fondue.”

  It was an incredible offer - cubes of crust
y white bread to dip into thick, melted cheese seasoned with the lure of the forbidden. But she was playing with her wedding ring, pulling it up to her knuckle, then pushing it back to the base of her finger. I wasn’t good with stress and I knew it would ruin the meal, that after a few bites I’d stop eating and the flame of the burner would go out, leaving a tasteless, grease-covered lump in the pot. So I said no thank you and ordered spaghetti with tomato sauce, and tried to make small talk for the duration of the meal, while Mum drank cup after cup of water and ate a few spoonfuls of soup.

  “Dessert?” she asked. “Or look, they have root beer floats, your favourite.”

  I shook my head, no, watched her refill our water glasses. Our parents held strong beliefs, but they weren’t crazy strict. I couldn’t imagine what Deborah could possibly have done to merit my father’s early return home from work, and far, far worse, his tears. In the past my sister had bought a leather coat, cheated on a French exam, been caught smoking a cigarette. None of those transgressions had resulted in my being disappeared for the evening. It had to be something colossal, maybe even criminal. Drugs? Theft?

  It was late when we finally left the restaurant; the house was quiet when we got home and the only light on was the pale bulb above the stove, illuminating nothing.

  Deborah never said anything about the incident to me, and I never asked, but the following week my parents told me that Aunt Lori had invited Deborah to go to Europe with her. “Leaving just the three of us together for the whole summer,” my Dad said, as if that was my special treat.

  That May, as soon as the last of the snow was gone and the top few inches of the soil had thawed, my mother decided to take down our childhood swing set to expand the vegetable garden. By mid-June the sprinkler ban had been introduced and all the lawns across town were yellow, but we carried water from the lake at the end of our road for the rows of bush beans, kohlrabi, zucchini, tomatoes and cucumbers. The simple chore became a ritual, first thing in the morning and every evening after supper - Mum and I pulling buckets of water on the red wagon from the lake to her garden, the lake to her garden. In the fall when we were putting up jars of pickles she corrected me, saying it wasn’t her garden, it was ours. She hadn’t grown the cucumbers, we had.