The Turning Point

by Freya North

  Oh my God, what’ll I do without my pa? How am I going to cope? How can I not have him there, steady and strong and always at home? How will I fix on my own the stuff that breaks or unravel the stuff that gets tied in a knot – the physical, the emotional? My pa has always been there to help me, in all aspects of my life, my whole life long. My bank stuff. My application forms. Somewhere to live in Vancouver. Driving me to friends, to work, to university. He bought Buddy for me. He booked my appointments with Dr Schultz and took me there. Fixed my pink bike when I was ten. Mopped up my puke the first and only time I got drunk. Sat for hours with me first time I was dumped. So often there for me during a seizure, there with his kindness and gentle authority when I came to. He took me to task when I was lazy at school, or rude, or when I strung Billy Sayers along because I didn’t know how to dump him. He was there those times my mom let me down, when I had to phone him to come get me and bring me back home. He was there even when I wanted to be on my own. When I flunked math. When Ty Jennings was an ass to me at our school prom. When they took my driver’s licence away. In life as I’ve known it, my dad made everything seem OK. Not having him here – ever again – terrifies me right now. I need to hear him tell me to believe in myself in order for me to be able to do so.

  Oh my God my dad is dead.

  I hate it that sometimes I rolled my eyes at him and said Pops! give it a break already! Like he got on my nerves – which I guess he did. But shouldn’t all parents care too much? That’s no failing. And he had to find double the amount of care because he had to be Mom and Dad. He devoted a lot of his life to me and now he’s gone so what does that mean? If he’s not looking out for me, who will be – and will I be OK? My dad never judged me but he always guided me.

  I just need more time with him.

  Please. Just not yet. Not now.

  Scott – my dad – would never consider that he made sacrifices for me but if you think about it, he did. He quit touring and performing so he could be a stay-at-home dad because my mom was, you know, not really capable of doing the job. Apart from one or two that didn’t really play a huge part anyway, he didn’t have girlfriends either. He said I was his girl and he didn’t need another. He was my home, he was my morning and my night, he was the food on my plate and the warmth in the house. I have a dream-catcher by my bed that Aaron gave me years ago, but my dad was my nightwatchman. He was always there for me – sometimes maybe a little too much. Making sure I never locked the bathroom door. Making sure I had my meds, took my meds, got enough sleep – all of that. Often, those were the times I’d back away or just get a bit mad with him, tell him to back off, especially when I was, like, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. I wanted to act like all my friends, even though looking back I can see how that’s precisely what it is to be a teenager, a bit of an act. I wanted the freedom not to be looked after the whole time. But the truth is, I always felt safe and really secure because my dad was always going to be there for me.

  I feel really scared right now. There’s so much I trusted him with, so much that I’d say to myself oh it’ll be OK, precisely because I had my dad so close in my life. We don’t know why I have seizures, we don’t know if I’ll ever be free of them. We don’t know what causes them but we do know that stress and tiredness can sometimes bring one on. I had one the day after I found out, which was the day after he died. Kyle was with me but it was my third or fourth since we’ve been together and he knows what to do, it doesn’t freak him out, his dad is a doctor and I know he’s watched a bunch of stuff on YouTube. He said I was going for a full three minutes. I really lacerated the inside of my cheek from biting it while I was seizing. It’s still so sore right now. I slept for eighteen hours straight after that. When I woke up, I had to relive the reality of my dad being dead all over again. For the rest of my life, I guess every day, when I wake up, I’ll have to know that my dad has died.

  Very privately, I know we both thought I’d go first. SUDEP – Sudden Unexplained Death from Epilepsy – affects sufferers aged twenty to forty in the main. It’s not common, but nor is it rare. It’s just there. But as my dad has always said – and he kind of made it my mantra – I have epilepsy, epilepsy doesn’t have me.

  My dad isn’t the sort of guy who dies young. He’s too vital. Too many people need him. What’ll the young bands do in Pemberton without their mentor, without someone helping them be the best that they can be? It’s more than rock ’n’ roll to those kids – he’d talk to them about sex and drugs and steer them right. How about the epilepsy charity he fund-raises for? What about all those movies yet to be made whose soundtracks will now be mediocre because my dad hasn’t written the scores? What makes me so mad is that it was his time to live – with me pretty much leaving home and now away at college, why shouldn’t he have had years and years of happiness with Frankie?

  I’m looking out of the window passing by the sign for Brandywine Falls. I’m on my way home with Kyle driving me. Going back home which can’t be home without my dad being there. He was my home. Now it feels to me that the walls that held me steady are crumbling, the windows out onto life are all misted up and there’s no view anyway, there’s just no view to look at.

  People have been so kind. But none of that helps. I have to bury my pa. A little bit of me is going with him, you know?

  I found it very scary, seeing my mum like that – all crumpled and torn like the paper we find under the kitchen table when she hasn’t been happy with her work. Sam tried to pull me away, take me to my room, I suppose. But I wanted to stay there in the kitchen, watching Steph hold up my mum. Steph literally held her up. I stood by because I couldn’t leave. It frightened me seeing her like that. But it also took my mind off what had happened to Scott.

  He died.

  Well that didn’t make sense.

  And Sam said something about him being on his way to us. And that didn’t make sense either. Sam was white as a sheet and still as a statue. We just watched as our mum went down. There was nothing we could do. We are just small kids. We needed someone strong to help her. The person we really needed was Scott. Recently, when things were going wrong in the house – like when the curtain pole came crashing down, or the second bigger leak when the pipe actually burst – Sam and me and Mummy all muttered Wish Scott was here. But when we found out, when I had to watch my mum disappearing and hear her sobbing, in some ways it was his fault that she was like that. Oh it was very confusing those first minutes.

  It helped when Auntie Peta arrived. She was on the doorstep a little while after Steph. She hugged me and kept saying it would be OK. So I believed her. And that’s when I started to cry. She kept saying I know, I know – well of course she didn’t know. She didn’t know what had happened other than that Scott had died and she didn’t know all the little reasons I was crying. I was crying for my bit of Scott – because I really believed that he gave me a part of him that was just for me. Like when I made him sit on my bed and I heaped all the toys on his lap and painted his fingernails. He sat very calmly. I can never get my mum to do that. She’ll sit for a moment then get up because she always has something to do. But Scott sat on my bed having his manicure, which he called a Man Cure, and that’s the only thing he had planned for that afternoon. That wasn’t so long ago. That was in February when he was last here. The last time any of us saw him. He said he’d keep the nail varnish on till it all chipped away. He wore it when he was recording his music in London and he was still wearing it when he left for the airport. I wonder how long it lasted? Strange how I never thought to tell Sam to email him and ask him about it.

  You wouldn’t actually call Scott a chatterbox person – because he was someone who didn’t waste time talking about all the this-and-thats that chatterboxes do. But when you were with him he seemed to really like to listen and then speak. I liked what we talked about. I loved those mornings in Canada when my mum was working and Sam and me had Scott to ourselves.

  I miss him very much. I wanted to know him for ever. I liked
him in our house. I liked seeing him bumble about with my mum. I liked it when he took me to school. Lauren’s mum told her that he was a bit gorgeous. Lauren’s mum phoned my mum and invited her out with the other mums to hear the whole story. Scott was very good at lifting things and opening things too which meant my mum had little reason to lose her temper and bang about when Scott stayed at ours.

  When my mum’s crying slowed down, I went over to her. She was sitting on the sofa with her sisters either side. I have never seen her look like that. She looked really terrible and it worried me until she held open her arms and I went onto her lap and cuddled into her neck. She made this tiny sad sound like a kitten. I just hugged her and hugged her and it felt OK to let my tears out too. Mummy, I said, what are we going to do? I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. No. No. No. No.

  She went away the next day, to Canada to be with Jenna and for the funeral. She told me she didn’t know how long she’d be gone for. I begged her to let me come. I didn’t want to be apart. I wanted to stay with her. I didn’t want to go to a funeral and see a coffin but I wanted to be back at Scott’s house. But she said she had to go by herself this time. I don’t know why. Me, Sam and my mum usually do everything together. We’re a tight little unit – that’s how Scott describes us. Described.

  I gave her some things to give to Jenna, like the tiny teddy that Scott won for me at the arcade in Hunstanton. I made a card with a picture of all of us and the bear, and inside I wrote her a letter. It’s private. I put a photo of me and Sam for Mummy in her suitcase. I thought about little Tara and Johnny and I wasn’t sure at all what to do about them.

  While my mum was away, Stephy stayed awhile and then Auntie Peta came back and then Stephy again. Our dad isn’t around at the minute; he’s had to go somewhere foreign again, for a little while he says, for business. We were back at school after our Easter break. I couldn’t concentrate and no one told me off. I shoved Maddie hard in netball because she bumped into me and no one told me off. I pushed my plateful of dinner on the floor, I don’t know why. Mrs Sharp came and took me into the medical room and there I howled like my mum had. It was shocking. I really missed my mum. I felt very sad and extremely worried about Scott dying. I mean what exactly happened? What happens when you die? Where do you go? Did it hurt? Was he scared? Did he know? Did he die quickly? Will he hear me if I talk to him? But I wouldn’t want him to come back as a ghost to see me.

  All that crap about when someone dies a part of you dies too? No. I was left painfully, vividly alive and acutely aware that we were parted now, Scott and I. Not by the mountains and the oceans. But parted for good. Flung asunder, one of us in heaven wherever that is – I just can’t work that one out – and one of us on earth. It was done. We were gone. He was absolutely dead. Weeks and weeks of longing to be back with him in Canada. And when I boarded that plane, it was a journey that filled me with a dread so black it was like thick tar cloying up my heart. My poor children. My poor babies. I shudder when I realize what they saw, what they heard. Their mother the banshee, thrashing about in her grief. Their mother the brain-dead, sitting numbskull-still on the sofa; a human tap of tears drip drip drip, saying nothing, just staring. I hate myself for being so absent, in such self-centred turmoil in front of the children, but I was helpless to be anything other. I hate myself for not listening to a word they said to me in those hours – and they cuddled me and spoke constantly – but it was just sound that seeped into one ear then got lost. Thoughts and feelings came at me in bilious waves that never stopped to settle, so I don’t know what I thought and I don’t really know how I felt. And the next day I was gone. The long hard haul over countries and the ocean and through time zones to return to that beautiful place I’d fallen in love with, to bury the man I’d entrusted my heart to.

  * * *

  I am exhausted. I didn’t sleep on the plane at all. I wanted it to fly slower; I didn’t want to cross time divides. It seemed an extraordinary cruelty to have me going back in time because still he wouldn’t be there. Why can’t going back in time turn back the clock? I cried as we flew over Greenland. I looked down on that melancholy expanse of empty white and I imagined heaven. I thought of Scott out there somewhere, cold and not knowing.

  How can the Welcome Figures do that to me? How could they take one of their own? Why didn’t they protect Aaron? Why did the mountains that his people revere, that he and Scott loved so much, do that to him? They asked me at Immigration why I was here.

  ‘I’ve come to see –’ I started, and I wanted to say my love, my man. I wanted to say Scott Emerson. But the officer seemed happy enough to hear that I’d come to their country just to see.

  No Scott waiting for me.

  It’s early evening and I’m in a cab heading for a hotel in Vancouver. It’s too late to drive all the way home. I don’t even know my way. When I’ve done the journey before, I’ve been Scott’s passenger, daydreaming out of the window. I’m picking up a car tomorrow to drive to Scott’s. Tomorrow, I’ll be back in Pemberton.

  Tomorrow, I’ll see Jenna. What the hell am I going to say to her? Her dad left home to come and see me and on the way, he and his childhood friend were killed. Jenna couldn’t find me. That poor girl. In the end, she sent a Facebook message to Steph to call her urgently. Jenna said to her, please tell Frankie yourself – I don’t want her to be on her own when she hears, it can’t be over the phone, someone needs to be there for her and for the children. Scott, you did well with that baby girl of yours.

  Usually I love a fancy hotel. That’s where Scott and I got to know each other after all. He’d planned that we’d have a long weekend in Vancouver this summer – told me that despite all his travels, it’s still the most beautiful city he knows. We never will. We will never stroll through Gastown hand in hand. I’ll never haul him up and down Robson looking at the shops. We won’t have lunch at the market on Granville Island. He won’t buy me Lululemon for my birthday. We can’t grab that coffee from Caffè Artigiano and sit on the steps of the Art Gallery planning what we’re going to do for the rest of the day.

  The hotel room – I hardly notice it. I need Scott pinching me, tickling me, saying stay awake, baby – got to beat the jet lag. I can’t. So I place two pillows in a line down the bed and I press the back of my body lightly against them, imagining it’s Scott spooning up to me. Let’s go to sleep.

  The Sea to Sky Highway. Route 99. I just want to get there but the views, oh the views. Howe Sound and those coastal mountains. From Squamish to Whistler, everything to the right is Garibaldi Provincial Park, all 200,000 hectares of it. Mountains shouldering glacial lakes like Lovely Water and Garibaldi. Rolling glaciers like Misty. Douglas fir, western hemlock, western red cedar in the lower reaches; then higher up the alpine fir, white bark pine, mountain hemlock and yellow cedar. Those volcanic peaks, the stuff of legend for the Ĺíĺwat and Squamish. Black Tusk – glowering and towering. I don’t want to look.

  It’s very strange, but I’m driving and the sun is out and there’s no traffic. It’s as if the way has been soothed and kept clear just for me. However, there’s a point along the route where quite suddenly something akin to freezing fog ripples through my body and I have to pull over sharp. I put my head on the steering wheel and I cry.

  Was it here?

  Am I close?

  Then I’m passing Whistler.

  I’ve passed the roadside warnings for bears. Are they sleeping this time of year? I can’t remember what the proper word for that is. If I had Sammy and Annabel in the back, they’d know, they’d laugh at me. The road climbs and curves dramatically and here’s the breathtaking vista after Nairn Falls. I remember Scott going pensive the first time we reached this point, how he looked at the road ahead and said I hope you like it.

  I’m a little cross with Pemberton village as I drive by, a little surprised and shocked. I’ve slowed right down and all I see is that everything is as it was last time I was here. Why are they all going about their day? Why hasn’
t the entire village ground to a halt? Scott and Aaron have died.

  And I’m passing by the road that goes to the golf club and the airfield and I just can’t bear it.

  The community at Mount Currie.

  Aaron.

  On to the D’Arcy road.

  Scott.

  I don’t think I can do this.

  I can see the house now. Home. I park up just after the turning and decide to walk the long drive up to Scott’s. There are wild blue lupins everywhere. He told me about them, he said to come in spring to see them. The steps up towards the house. It feels like my chest is caving in. The porch with the chairs and the swing seat. He’s put the cushions away for winter, or because he was leaving to come and see me. I don’t know where he keeps them. Over there, the studio – my little Sam’s first taste of a man cave.

  I know he isn’t home.

  Opening the door. The warmth, the scent; homely and familiar. Jenna looking up, standing up, staggering over. Neither of us can speak, we just crumple against each other, not in an embrace, simply entwining to stop each other withering to the floor. I don’t know how long we’re standing there, bodies heaving with stinging tears, voices hollow, hoarse and not human.

  And then she says, did you walk, Frankie – did you walk?

  These past two days I have believed anything and nothing. It’s the same for Jenna. In her mind, it’s quite possible that I have walked here from England because everything else is far stranger at the moment.

  The house is full of flowers. What would Scott say?

  I have a peculiar urge to knock before I enter the bedroom. I don’t but I push the door open very slowly, very gently. I tiptoe in and close the curtains. He made the bed before he left. The pillows are slightly skew. I bet he was humming one of his melodies as he whoomped the duvet. I bet he didn’t turn and check before he left. He probably changed his hum to whistling as he made his way downstairs.