by Dan Robson
I hunted through every dusty old box we had. It seemed a lost hope. He must have tossed the tapes out years ago, forgetting that one day in the future I’d need to hear his voice.
All I had was the voicemail message he’d kept on the house phone: “You’ve reached the Robson family, I’m sorry we’re unavailable to take your call right now, but leave your name, phone number, and a detailed message and we’ll return your call as soon as possible. Thank you.”
That, and the last phone call I missed: “Hey, son, it’s your dad calling. It’s about five-thirty. Give me a call when you get this message, okay? Talk to you later. Love you. Bye.”
There was no other recording of his voice. No message of wisdom or guidance; nothing like you read about in stories. I was angry with him for that. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d needed it until I searched and found nothing.
I played the call over and over, trying to satisfy that longing by lingering on the sound of his voice and hoping it would never fade.
Later, I set up the old VCR and hunted through two boxes of VHS tapes until I found the one in the yellow Kodak case labelled Maple Leaf Gardens. I’d known exactly what I was looking for: the video from my first year in hockey, when I was seven and my team played at the Gardens in an Easter Seals tournament. A parent had brought their camcorder into the dressing room before we chased the puck around the ice, barely able to skate, and before I wobbled in goal, flopping every time the puck got close. It was an enormous moment. In the video our parents are helping us get ready to go on, since we’re still much too young to handle the medieval armour of hockey gear on our own. I’d hoped we had the sense to have spoken to the camera together, Dad and seven-year-old me.
I recognize his burgundy jacket with green sleeves as soon as the camera pans to the corner. He’s facing away from it, wrestling with a sweater he’s trying to pull over my chest protector as I stick my arms in the air, trying to help. After a brief jostle, my shaggy blond hair pops through the opening and I smile at the camera with a missing tooth. Dad turns and looks at the camera. He is thirty-five years old, his hair just starting to recede and his face still slim with youth. He smiles too. The camera pans across us and away.
One day, shortly after I’d given up searching, I opened the drawer in the side table next to Dad’s bed. It was filled with old keys and reading glasses and other odd items he’d tucked away. And in the back, I found a silver recorder. It was newer than the one I remembered. Fully digital, with an SD card. It couldn’t have been more than a decade old. I felt a rush of excitement—and hope. Maybe it was the voice I was searching for.
I waited several hours, until later that night, to sit alone and play whatever the recorder had captured. The screen lit up. There was only one file. It was more than an hour long.
I pressed play.
It took a few moments to realize that the static was the sound of a moving car. There was a slow hum, almost a rumble, rising and falling with traffic.
I closed my eyes and listened to the world pass by as we drove, not knowing where the road would lead. Him in the driver’s seat, and me beside.
Neither of us said a word.
* * *
—
My fingers thin in Dad’s work gloves, I gently grip the reciprocating saw by its handle and its neck, my finger twitching nervously on the trigger—the jagged blade anxious but ready to begin the demolition.
I’m standing in front of the wall Dad put up and that we’re now taking down. A perfectly straight red laser line runs from floor to ceiling along the drywall beside the door frame, carefully marking the first cut, a couple of inches from the concrete wall it meets at the corner.
Matt offers some instruction. “You always want to keep the guard up against whatever you’re sawing,” he says. “Because if you don’t it will bounce around.”
He takes the saw from me and places it loosely against the wall as he pulls the trigger. It whirls to life—and the blade jolts back quickly.
“But if you keep it nice and tight…” He presses in, pushing near the guard and carving horizontally from the edge of the wall to the laser line. It makes a perfect incision.
Then he hands the saw back to me.
I set the blade on the line on an angle the way Matt has instructed. A lip beneath the blade presses against the wall to exact the carnage.
The saw shakes to life in my hand when I press the trigger. The blade jumps back, startling me—until Matt yells for me to push down. I do, this time. The saw sends out a high-pitched squeal until the drywall grumbles as it splits apart.
I stop near the floor as the cut gets lower, uneasy with how quickly it’s all coming apart, and step back in a cloud of drywall dust. My hands are numb.
Matt takes over, finishing the first incision down to the bottom, until the white baseboard pops off. I stand back as he repeats the same cut a few inches over, and then again next to the edge of the steel stud (along with wood, the metal is the other material commonly used for framing). There are now three long cuts through the drywall from the ceiling to the floor, crumbling white innards of the structure lining each gash. Wounded and weak, it’s ready to fall.
I line up to start the demolition but feel weighted with guilt. My first kick with Dad’s steel toe is soft and apprehensive. The wall bulges but doesn’t break. I take a deep breath and deliver another kick, harder this time—and there’s an audible crack. A small buckle folds out, opening along the line we cut.
It feels good. I picture myself standing next to Dad as a thirteen-year-old, taking out the wall between the kitchen and the family room. Side by side, swinging hammers.
The guilt shifts to anger. I step back and throw all my weight into the next drive, connecting with my heel. A three-foot piece of drywall punches out and the steel frame bends with the blow.
The crew stands on the other side, filming the spectacle. They can’t see me bite my lip and take another deep, long breath.
Everything falls apart, eventually.
I punch the wall hard with a left, at eye level. It buckles a bit, but it takes the right of the one-two to break through, knocking out a rough rectangle.
That sets off a flurry of punches and kicks as fragments scatter across the floor.
I move across the wall, knocking out the next section with more blows. I throw everything into the last piece, reaching from the floor to the ceiling. The drywall falls back, stumbling like a beaten boxer before collapsing to the floor.
“Oh, hey there,” Matt says, as I’m suddenly visible to the others.
I’m breathing fast, standing where the wall had been, my fists still clenched.
I give two more violent kicks to a final piece that clings to the bottom of the frame. Shattered bits of drywall lie in a dusty pile on the floor. I let out a long, deep sigh.
“Well,” I say, catching my breath. “That was fun.”
The job is far from over, though. We still have to bring down the steel studs and a bulkhead that sits just above the door, which Dad built in the original reno to cover a large air vent that runs across the length of the ceiling to the furnace. We have to be careful here, because several live wires run through the bulkhead too.
We decide it’s best to make a small incision a couple inches in from the edge of the bulkhead and to pull down the drywall from the opposite side so that we don’t damage the outside edge, which we can still use to help frame the new doorway.
The laser level on the floor shoots up the wall and backwards across the ceiling, creating a straight line. Matt takes the reciprocating saw and raises it above his head, cutting in to the ceiling across the red line from one edge to the middle—then he flips it around and starts at the other edge, bracing the saw with his opposite hand so that he can make a precise cut from end to end.
With the old steel frame, he takes a less precise approach—revving up the saw an
d cutting into the spine in the middle of the opening I’d kicked out. Then he slices quickly through the other two vertical frames, the bottom half of each falling to the floor, leaving the other half dangling from the top.
Matt laughs maniacally.
“Okay,” I say. “Was not prepared for that.”
He turns and takes the saw to the other corner of the old doorway. The metal studs hit the floor with a crash. A couple of the top pieces cling to the ceiling for a moment and then fall down too.
“Demolition man,” I say, slowly clapping my work gloves together.
Matt grins. Destruction is catharsis.
He reaches up and yanks on the back end of the drywalled ceiling, which is now held up only by the edge we’d cut the incision through. He yanks hard and pulls down a large rectangular piece. We crack off the remaining bits of drywall clinging to the severed edge.
The result is impressively precise, considering the violence of the procedure. Matt breaks off one last piece of drywall hanging from the corner.
The old wall and door frames are a shambles of terracotta-coloured rubble, steel bones, and drywall dust. We stand back, surveying our conquest.
“Sweet,” Matt says.
* * *
—
By the middle of the afternoon we have the wooden skeleton of three walls up. And I’m exhausted.
We built the remaining partitions on the floor, just as we had the first. The far partition with the window and the fuse box area takes the longest, but Jonathan and Tim manage to work out the measurements and piece the headers together. I fire the bolts through the bottom studs into the concrete, starting to feel the violent rush of construction. And that’s what it is: force and violence. The act of taking wood and dismembering it, hammering it into a structure, drilling it, compelling metal and wood to do what you want them to do—including their own demolition. I was struck by the physical satisfaction of the process.
While Tim and Jonathan finish the far wall, Matt and I build the partition that will divide the bedroom and the bathroom. The space is starting to take shape.
After Matt removes the lights from the ceiling and unwires the fixtures, I head up to the garage to get Dad’s work lights, two big rectangular lamps behind a cage that hangs off a yellow stand. The set has been around since I was a teenager, when I’d pull the lights out of the garage and place them at the end of the driveway, attached by a couple of extension cords, so that my friends and I could see the basketball court our driveway had become. We’d play two-on-two out there until our neighbour, Bill, would come out and remind me that he had to go to work at six a.m. That was the only time I’d ever plugged them in—and I’d found them fantastically useful—but now I hauled them out for their real purpose: to illuminate the work area until we were ready to put up the new lights.
There’s only one section left to frame in the new bedroom. We need to take it to the edge of the stairs, building in the two doors that will lead to the new bathroom and bedroom. A duct runs across the top corner of that wall, so we’ll have to build a bulkhead to hide it.
I have no concept of how to do this, but Jonathan and I are given the task.
We cut twelve-inch blocks and push them up next to the long, wide duct that runs along the wall above the doorway, spacing them out so they hang down a couple of inches below the duct, the wall, opposite the wall, and at every other ceiling joist. Then we shoot a couple of nails diagonally through the top edge to fasten the wood to the joist.
Next, Jonathan and I need to cut a two-by-four into one-and-a-half-foot pieces. These will extend from the joists on the wall to the wood that peeks down beneath the other side of the duct. Without anyone watching, I try my hand at cutting the wood on the sawhorses, using the mitre saw. I’m much more nervous about this than a grown man should be.
First I try to draw a straight line in pencil, using a discarded scrap of wood as a ruler. It seems straight enough, but it’s definitely not exact. I hold the saw with my right hand and nervously place my left hand on the side of the two-by-four overhanging the stand. I put some weight into it, holding it in place, and slowly pull the trigger as the saw squeals to life. I’m timid—and don’t press down hard enough. The saw bounces and I let go with my left hand, retreating. None of the guys sees me flinch. I take a deep breath, line up the blade again, and hold it firm. This time the blade cuts clean through.
With the pieces to build the bulkhead, I run upstairs to the laundry room, to Dad’s tool bag, and fish around for his small red level. I just need to borrow it. I’m careful about mixing Dad’s tools with the ones Matt and Jonathan have brought. I’m worried they’ll get lost in the chaos downstairs. Any of his tools that don’t fit in my belt are quickly returned to his bag.
We’ll use the level to make sure each piece is plumb and to check the angle of a joint we need to nail in place for another bulkhead to encase the water pipes that run above the back end of the bathroom.
The bulkheads come together much more quickly than I thought. The pieces of wood that hang down from the ceiling connect perfectly with the pieces set horizontally across the bottom of the duct. The nails that hold them in place are a mess of different angles and depths—but I tell myself that no one will ever see the rough work beneath the drywall.
We want to get all the framing done before the end of the day, so we hurry to build the final wall at the far end of the bathroom, which is set a couple of feet from the furnace to keep within fire regulations.
Jonathan and I think we’ve measured meticulously and cut the pieces carefully. But when we raise the wall and try to slide it into place, it doesn’t fit beneath the bulkhead we built above it. It’s too tall, by at least two inches.
Something is way off. But we have no clue as to what.
We stand around for several minutes, staring at the wayward frame—remeasuring, again and again—until Jonathan has a breakthrough. We used the wrong length to build the bulkhead, he says. Instead of using eight-and-a-half-inch pieces we used ten-and-a-half-inch ones. And we did that because, after we cut one piece to the right length, I grabbed the discarded end instead of the properly measured one. Then we replicated the wrong length to finish the rest of the bulkhead.
A simple mistake, but a pretty stupid one—and it sets us back. We have to hammer out the pieces, bashing back the wood until the deeply driven nails pop out, and then piece it all back together. But even with the right-sized studs, it’s still a tight fit. As Tim and I brace the frame, Jonathan hammers the top beam until it finally nudges into place beneath the joists.
We check it with the laser level, the red light shooting up the concrete wall beside us and across the ceiling in a straight line. Everything is flush. At a quick glance this might appear to have been done by a crew of professionals.
The rec area of the basement looks like a scrap yard. Shards of wood are everywhere; the carpet is ripped up and lies in a folded, dusty pile in one corner. The place smells like sawdust and metal. We start to tidy up, ready to end our first day of construction. I’m exhausted. My muscles feel wobbly. My bones quite literally ache. I’m fully dazed.
The framing is almost complete. And despite the odd angles of our nails and the parts we had to force into place, the studs are nearly level and the walls look like they could stand for decades.
Part III
What Lies Beneath
10
I knew my father for half his life. It was the half in which a man is supposed to have figured it out, in the way that a proper human adult should understand how to care for themselves and the people they love. The smarter, better half—I imagine.
I knew that part well.
But I didn’t know much about the first half of him, about the life he lived before I was alive. There was his dream to be a pilot. And there were photographs that told fragments of stories. Of his long rock-star hair and hot summer days playing softb
all near my grandparents’ house, sometime way back in the 1970s—years before I was born. I loved to look at those photos, tucked in shoeboxes and dusty albums, because they held hints of a past that seemed familiar—his eyes, his smile, the shape of his face—but also foreign. It was Dad as a boy, as a teenager, as a young man. I always found that hard to comprehend. Not in an entirely self-centred way. In theory, I knew my parents were humans with independent lives before my sisters and I came along. But their lives became so much about our lives that it was hard to gain perspective on the time before us.
One of my regrets after Dad died was not having taken more time to learn about who he was, and why. To ask more questions about what he daydreamed of as he scribbled in that green algebra notebook. Or who he wanted to be when he was young. Or to hear stories about girls he adored and tried to make them adore him back. Or the ones he truly loved. And what it feels like to have one steal your heart and break it.
Maybe it’s that, as kids, we don’t really understand time or how fleeting it is. We don’t know that the people who raised us will be gone one day. I mean, we know it as a fact—in the way we know that space is endless, say—but we can’t comprehend it, so we don’t try. And besides, we have so much of our own living to do. Life is too exciting to wonder about the people who gave it to you.