Broken Man on a Halifax Pier

by Choyce, Lesley;

  She has been slipping of late. Slipping but not lost. Sometimes she can’t recall what we did the day before. She’s stopped pretending when her memory slips. “Tell me about yesterday,” she’ll say. And I get out my journal and read to her.

  I’ve given up on fiction. Real life is more important. Call it creative nonfiction if you like — a fancy term, a vague term. But it means I can tell the story the way I want to tell the story. Isn’t that what every writer wants to do? My story. My way.

  But of course, it’s our story. Our world.

  It may surprise you to know that we got married. We had both pronounced that we were “not the marrying type.” But that changed.

  It was a simple ceremony, performed in the house three years ago. Attending were the usual suspects: Rolf, Joe, Beth Ann, Mackenzie, Stanley, Brenda, and little Dylan. Dylan is now five, nearly as old as the house. He’s smart and cute. What else can a grandfather say about his grandson? He has three grandfathers — Joe, me, and Mackenzie’s father, who shows up from time to time claiming his title to a grandson.

  We have a dog. I guess it comes with marriage. The dog — a black Lab mutt — was dropped off in the woods by the house, abandoned. We blame it on someone from the city. He arrived the day after we were married. Showed up at the back door. We fed him. He never left.

  We have a house, a marriage, a dog, a life. Broken man, fully repaired.

  Is it that simple, that easy? No, of course not.

  I am Ramona’s memory. And I remind myself of that every morning. She continues to lose pieces of her past. But she does not seem to lose her beautiful self.

  Yesterday, when we woke, as I was getting my focus on the room around me, she leaned up on her elbow and said this: “I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name.” Then she paused, leaned forward to kiss me and added, “But I remember that I love you.”

  And so. Maybe that is enough.

  Folks around here still find it curious that I do not work. I know that the fishermen, all men who think much like my father, believe me to be less of a man because I am not employed. I’ve discussed this with Stanley. I’ve asked his advice. It’s his money really that has allowed us this life.

  “Work’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” he said. “I worked my ass off and used work as an excuse to wreck my life. The smartest thing I ever did was to bail out of what I was doing. The dumbest thing I ever did was walk away from Brenda. If my money can allow you and Ramona to live your life, then that’s one good thing that came out of my so-called career. So let ’em talk.”

  Stanley knows I take good care of Ramona. What he may not know is that Ramona takes care of me. I am her memory but she is my anchor. The medication seems to prevent the sort of fear and anxiety that comes with memory loss, and so Ramona remains calm and, too often, quiet. She sleeps more often in the days now. She slips in and out of time on occasion. Sometimes she recites scenes she once memorized from plays and films she acted in. Sometimes I can’t fully tell if she knows she is acting or if she believes those scenes, those lines, were once part of her real life.

  When this happens, I roll with it. I tell her I’ve forgotten my lines.

  And then she returns to me. “Once upon a time, there was a man alone on a Halifax pier.”

  “And then there was a woman,” I add, “a beautiful actress.”

  “No, a princess,” she says and smiles. Her eyes tell me she, the true Ramona, is still there.

  “A princess of spirit, a healer of wounded knights,” I say.

  “Oh, now this is getting good,” she says.

  “Not getting good. Is good.”

  “What did you say your name was?”

  That’s her favourite line. She uses it at the strangest times. The other day, midafternoon, she grabbed me and pulled me into the bedroom. After we made love, she rolled over and looked at me. “What did you say your name was?”

  And we both laughed.

  I keep my parents’ letters in a safe place, my father’s old tool box, under our bed. I keep a copy of our story, my unfinished work of creative nonfiction, in the box as well. I take it out from time to time to read in sequence to Ramona when she asks. Sometimes I get several chapters into it and she says, “Stop. Go back to the beginning.”

  And I do. I go back to the beginning. I am Ramona’s memory. And I have promised to be faithful and diligent in recording the details of our extraordinary life together.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to acknowledge the use of lyrics from the Stan Rogers songs “Barrett’s Privateers” and “The Northwest Passage.” I would also like to express my gratitude to Julia Swan for her initial editing of the manuscript and to Dominic Farrell for his diligence in the final edit. The writing of the novel took place at Lawrencetown Beach on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia with the support of my loving wife, Linda.