After You've Gone

by Lori Hahnel

  It was my day to pick Charlie up. I drove over to the school as usual. The ice-covered streets reflected the low indigo clouds; skiffs of snow blew across the road.

  “Lita, can we drop into the library for a minute? I need to look something up in the encyclopedia.”

  “Of course, Charlie.”

  I parked the Buick across the street from the library and carefully took Charlie across the street. But I just couldn’t stomach the thought of going in.

  “Do you mind if I wait for you in the car? I’m feeling kind of tired today.”

  “Sure. I won’t be long.”

  When she was safely inside I started back to my car. I couldn’t help but glance up at the second floor window that I knew to be the staff room (we’d gone up there together to get coffee once), and there he was. It was hard to tell from that distance, but he seemed to look at me for a moment before he turned and disappeared. I kept walking. As I neared the curb and turned to watch the yellow headlights of passing cars, it crossed my mind how easy it would be to do an Anna Karenina, or a Joseph Koudelka, right then. How simple to step out into the blowing snow on the icy road in front of a car, and have this pain and longing and loneliness over. And no one would ever know it wasn’t an accident.

  But of course there were Elsa and Sarah to think about. Jake would be upset, though I was pretty sure he would get over it. Last but not least there was Charlie. I remember how I felt after Pop died and I knew I could never do that to Charlie, who really had only Sofia and me in the world.

  I’ll tell you what was almost worse than anything else about all of this. Charlie loved him almost as much as I did. I knew that. And John knew it, too. Once story hour was done that spring, she was miserable for a long time. That tore my heart out, watching her cry over the summer, and I tried to do what I could to help her feel better, though God knows I felt pretty horrible myself.

  After a while Charlie’s crying stopped, but it wasn’t long before she started sleepwalking. The first time, I didn’t know what was happening. She came into the living room one night just after midnight, where I was watching the late show, Brief Encounter with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.

  “Charlie, it’s very late. Maybe we can watch the late show together when you’re here on the weekend sometime.”

  She didn’t answer, and stopped in front of the window.

  “What’s the matter? Did you hear something outside?”

  I went to the window, but saw nothing. I looked at her. Her eyes darted around the room for a few seconds and then she started to cry. I put my arms around her narrow shoulders and guided her over to the couch.

  “What’s the matter? Did you have a bad dream?”

  She said something I didn’t understand. At first I thought she might be speaking Romanian, though I knew Sofia was careful to always speak English to her.

  “Charlie. Look at me.”

  Words tumbled out of her mouth, but made no sense. It scared me, but in a few moments she snapped out of it. I gave her some water and took her back to her bedroom and she fell asleep immediately.

  “John,” I whispered on the way back downstairs, fighting back my own tears now. “Look what you’ve done to us.”

  When I told Sofia about it, she said Charlie had never done anything like that before. But over the next few months she sleepwalked at home and at my house several times. It gradually stopped. And after that she never mentioned Mr. Lair again.

  I wished forgetting John could have been as easy for me. As the days passed, I began to see Mami’s face again when I looked in the mirror. What was wrong with me, anyway? I must have been insane, absolutely insane. A man like John attracted to me? Once again, I felt a deep shame. Shame that I could be so stupid, that I could let myself get so carried away. The truth is I couldn’t help it. I was lost to him as soon as I saw him, maybe even years before I saw him, crazy as that sounds. But I was so ashamed of my loneliness, my desperation.

  One day I took the National off the stand where it usually sat. I hadn’t played in a while. Instead of picking the guitar up, though, I sat down in the chair I usually played in and just looked at it. I looked at it for a long time. The sunshine from the window it sat near glinted on the metal.

  You don’t have to actually play it. You could just clean the fingerprints and dust off it.

  Dust. I hadn’t noticed until then that it was dusty, had sat there so long untouched that it was covered in dust. That spooked me. I could not make myself walk the three feet from my chair to the guitar stand to pick it up. I could not move. A heavy weight in the middle of my chest pinned me to the chair, and the more I thought about picking up the guitar, the more impossible it seemed. We’d played Duke Ellington’s “Solitude” together, John and I. That day seemed so long ago, like a dream. Did it really happen, did any of that really happen? I wasn’t sure how long I sat there, but the phone rang and broke the spell and I got up to answer it, something I normally didn’t do when I was playing. But of course, I wasn’t playing.

  Day after day it went like that. I did pick it up and dust it off once in a while, set it back on the stand. But actually play it? No. I could not. I had no drive to make music at all. I felt guilty and sad about it, but ultimately powerless, like this beautiful thing I had, this ability to make music, was gone and there was no way to get it back. I felt like that after Bill died, when Sarah was little.

  After a while of this I decided to take it off its stand and put it back in its case. To keep the dust off, I told myself, but that wasn’t really why. I didn’t want to have to look at it. Having it locked up in its case made me feel even worse, though. I thought about selling it, playing one of my other guitars, though the National had always been my favourite, and for a long time my only guitar. It crossed my mind that I ought to sell them all, get rid of them. What was an old woman doing playing guitar, anyway? I should sell them, get them out of my house, spend my time gardening and taking care of my granddaughter, like other women my age did. I knew I could never really go through with selling them, but found some twisted solace in concocting this backup plan. A plan to chicken out, completely, if things got bad enough.

  It occurred to me then that I wasn’t even fifty and that I might simply be blocked. After all, if writers could be blocked, maybe musicians and other artists could be, too. When I was away from playing after Bill died, I’d used Sarah as an excuse, and maybe that was true for the first six months or so, but I’d left off playing for three years. Three years, after which I kicked myself for leaving it so long. Three years of my life that I could have been playing. It’s easy to say that to yourself when you’re on the other side of it. It’s another thing when you’re blocked, another thing entirely.

  Many times over the years I’d thought about what had happened to Darlene, and couldn’t help thinking that it had been my fault, at least partly. No matter how many times I told myself my little ritual and the fire were coincidence, a nagging voice in the back of my mind whispered that my evil intent caused it. And now that same voice was telling me that it was my turn now. That what had happened between John and me was payback, that I deserved all the pain, and more. I had brought it all on myself.

  The thing I really didn’t get was this: how could you miss something so intensely that you never knew you needed before?

  Twenty-Six

  Lita

  August 1967

  THE SUN BEAT DOWN ON JAKE and I as we lay on our backs on a blanket on the sand of Regina Beach. It was midweek, so there weren’t as many people around as on the weekends. Still, it was a hot day, so there was a fair crowd. We were near the grass, a little ways down from the concession.

  It had taken some work to convince Jake to take a day off midweek. When I suggested we spend a day at the beach, he’d laughed, said he was too busy. He had a hotel to run, he insisted. And yes, the hotel was thriving, doing better than ever. But I kept after him and finally, he’d agreed.

  He’d been working way too hard, I thought,
for a very long time. Lately he’d seemed tired, distracted, irritable. I’d even been wondering for a while if I might broach the subject of retirement with him. He was a relatively young man, not yet sixty. He’d worked hard for many years, dedicated himself to the Hotel Saskatchewan, then to his own hotel. We had all we needed or wanted, the house had been paid off long ago. There was no reason for him to continue to work the way he did. What did he want to prove, I wondered? Then again, maybe I was the one who wanted a change. That was definitely part of it.

  I could tell, even at breakfast, that getting away from work was already doing him good. We hit the road at about eleven, stopped at the Blue Bird Café in the town of Regina Beach for lunch, and then hit the sand. We opened our blue-and-white striped beach umbrella and lay and read, took dips in the lake and listened to our new portable transistor radio. Jake always kept it tuned to CBC, because he was fond of classical music.

  By about 4:30, I was half dozing, no longer reading the book propped up in the sand. Getting away was good. I’d hardly thought of John since we’d left that morning. Well. Hardly. I had wondered a little if he and his wife ever came to the beach. I supposed they must. Everyone did. I nodded a bit as I thought about the little place in the Qu’Appelle Valley I’d always dreamed of having. Had John ever been to the Qu’Appelle Valley? It was one of the most beautiful places on earth. As far as I was concerned. The sun was too warm on my skin.

  But then a piece of piano music caught my attention, woke me from my doze. I reached over and turned the radio up a little and Jake, back from the water, rejoined me on the blanket.

  “What is this music?” I asked. “It’s Beethoven, I know, but what’s it called?”

  He listened for a few seconds. “It’s the Pathetique Sonata . . . I think this part is the adagio. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It is. Beautiful.” We listened in silence. I was thankful Jake could have no idea of my associations with this piece of music. My mind stretched back to an afternoon over thirty years earlier, when Bill MacInnes had made love to me in the cool of a stand of trembling aspen, and some anonymous pianist had provided us with this background music. The day he’d asked me to marry him. I’d been to Regina Beach many times since that day, and sometimes thought vaguely of that afternoon. But the music brought it into the sharpest focus. I felt the cool of the shade on my flesh, smelled the damp earth and the trees, felt Bill nuzzle my neck. I could almost feel that damned tree root digging into the small of my back.

  The piece ended. I wasn’t sad, exactly, not really. It would have been easy to lie there and think of all the unrealized dreams, all the promise Bill and I had had right then, and how soon it had ended. I didn’t let myself think of that. I thought of the aspens, Bill’s young, hungry mouth on my young, hungry body, the cool shade, and how pleasant it could be to drag out an old memory. Especially nice because John still festered inside me, all the hurt and regret, what had happened between us.

  Then out of the blue a thought came: forgiveness. I had to forgive John if I ever wanted to feel better. I still thought of him every day, first thing when I opened my eyes and last thing before I slept. I’d told myself that I’d forgiven him, but I hadn’t really. I was still hurt and angry. I watched a lone seagull circle high overhead, become a black speck in the blue before it disappeared. The more I held onto the Beethoven sonata, the more it seemed there were a lot of people besides John who I thought I’d forgiven but hadn’t at all, not any of them. Pop. Ma. Gus, Darlene, Bill. John. Jake.

  “Jake?”

  He’d fallen asleep again. I thought I’d let him snooze while I swam one last time, and then we should probably think about packing up. I swam out a long ways, thinking again of Bill and the dumb things he did, like swimming out past the buoys. But I had to forgive Bill for those dumb things. I had to forgive all those people who’d hurt me. Holding onto my hurt and anger was making it worse for me. I had to let go. And maybe some of those people were angry at me, or felt hurt by me. Maybe if you want to be forgiven, you have to forgive yourself. In pardoning we are pardoned, or something like that.

  When I reached the buoys I turned around, headed back to shore. Maybe we might stay in a hotel overnight and spend another day at the beach. Jake looked more relaxed than I’d seen him in months, and I knew I was more relaxed. I’d give it a try.

  I sat down on the blanket and towelled off, lit a cigarette. He was still asleep.

  “Jake? Wake up, I want to talk to you.”

  I shook him. He didn’t move. I shook him again, called his name. The water on the lake was still, the sounds of the other people on the beach became muffled. What had seemed peaceful just moments ago now seemed empty and terrifying. Everything moved in slow motion. A lifeguard came over, and after a minute he called an ambulance. I knew Jake was gone. Maybe he even died during the Pathetique Sonata. But I hoped it was when I was swimming and thinking about how relaxed he looked.

  Turns out I never did retire in the Qu’Appelle Valley, not with Bill or with Jake. Or anyone else.

  ƒ

  Part Four

  Twenty-Seven

  Lita

  September 1982

  ON A WARM SUNDAY AFTERNOON I was out on the verandah with the National when a blonde girl with a knapsack on her back and a guitar case in one hand opened the front gate and started up the walk. As she got closer, I could see she was very pregnant.

  “Elsa?”

  “Yes, it’s me. Surprise, Grandma.”

  She smiled and put her guitar down like it weighed a ton. I made her sit down and have a glass of water before I started asking questions.

  “I thought your band was touring.”

  “We were. I mean, they still are. But for obvious reasons, it’s just not working out for me anymore. I’m tired all the time. I have a bladder the size of a peanut. I’ve only got six more weeks to go. It’s time to take a rest.”

  “I should say so. Does your mother know about this?”

  “She does. She’s none too happy about it. So I wondered if you’d mind if I stayed with you a while. I could crash with some of my friends, but . . . ”

  “Don’t even think about it. You need some rest. You can stay with me as long as you like.”

  Elsa fell asleep before it was properly dark, almost before I pulled down the faded green blinds in the front room. I remember when I was heavily pregnant with Sarah in the summer of 1937, I tossed and turned and never got a decent sleep. The huge belly always got in the way. I’d lie with a pillow between my knees because of my strange new widened hips and hormone-loose joints, had to get up what seemed like every few minutes to pee. I stupidly looked forward to the good night’s sleep I’d get once the baby was born. But Elsa slept like a babe, a gently snoring babe, on my old couch. I wondered if she’d be in any shape to celebrate her twentieth birthday, less than a week away. I thought about throwing a surprise party and then wondered if she was a little fed up with surprises right then.

  I forget where it was she decided to drop out of the tour. I think the band was somewhere in BC, maybe Kelowna. A long way from Regina, anyway, poor girl. A first pregnancy can throw you like that, you can go along and think you’re fine, think you’ll be able to carry on the way you are until the last minute, then a couple of hours of pushing and voila. Somewhere along the line, you find you’re not quite in control the way you thought you were. It can be more than a little unsettling. Come to think of it, though, you don’t even have to be pregnant for that to happen.

  I knew I would have to clear out the back bedroom for her. I’d also have to call Sarah and let her know that Elsa was here. And we’d have to make a little shopping trip, get some food appropriate for an expectant mother. But all that could wait. If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s what can wait and what can’t. Right then, I meant to enjoy the weather and sit and play some of the old songs on my National steel guitar, my first and truest love.

  An hour or so later I called Sarah.

 
; “I hope you don’t mind her staying with you, Mom,” she said. “If you do, just let me know. I can’t believe that girl. I would have thought she’d know better. I mean, imagine, in this day and age . . . ”

  “Imagine what? That young people fall in love? I have no doubt they still do that.”

  “Love. Yes, well I don’t know how much that came into the picture. But with birth control these days, I would have thought this couldn’t happen.”

  “If I recall correctly, you weren’t much older when you were pregnant with her.”

  “I was twenty-four. There’s a huge difference between nineteen and twenty-four. And I was married.”

  There was no point in pursuing the matter. I could hear the exasperation in Sarah’s voice. Oh, if anyone had told me when my precious Sarah Kali was a little child that she’d turn out to be so judgmental, so rigid, I never would have believed them. But it was true. She was a throwback to Bill’s dear old Mum in some ways, though she was never racist, or mean. She just had a very circumscribed way of looking at the world. It disappointed me, puzzled me. Bill’s mum had died when Sarah was only four. I didn’t think she’d had time to influence the girl that much. Maybe it was genes.

  From a very early age, Sarah was nothing like me. Other than her looks, she wasn’t much like Bill, either. Bill had been easy-going, relaxed, at least in the early days of our relationship. Sarah was conscious of what people thought even as a small child. She was very concerned with appearances. Maybe she learned that from Jake. I don’t know. But where Bill and I were creative types, a bit on the wild or carefree side, Sarah wasn’t interested in creative things at all. She excelled at mathematics, and became a math teacher. She married Rob, a young bank manager, at age twenty-three and Elsa came along a year later, followed by Jacob two years after that.