At the dock, she handed me her keys and said, “Could you please go up there and find our car? It’s a red sports car, a Mustang. Here are the keys … Please bring it back down closer and help me get him out and into it. He’s lost a lot of blood. I put a tourniquet … you know, like they tell you to do … but the cut’s deep … and, and …”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “you take care of him. I’ll get the car.”
He was a big guy, so we struggled getting him out of the rocking boat and up the dock and into the passenger seat. He slumped there against the door and she went around to the driver’s side. The Mustang’s engine idled in the rain. When she saw I was hanging back she said, “Come with me, please. I’ll get in the back. If you could drive, please, it would be …”
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” I said, coming around and helping her in. I got into the driver’s seat.
She had slid over in the back seat so she could reach out to her husband. “Just turn right and go out to the highway and then turn north towards Bracebridge. Hurry, please.”
I was having a hard time thinking about Grace being this young and me being this young and how everything was so different from how I knew it had turned out. I drove through the rain and she didn’t ask me my name or how old I was or whether I even had a licence or how I had turned on the lights of the Mustang before I even had the keys. She just kept stroking the head of this unconscious man, murmuring about him not dying and how we would soon be there.
I pulled up to the emergency door and raced in to get someone. When they had rushed him into the back, I stood there alone, not sure what to do next. I went into the men’s and did my best to dry off. That’s when I remembered I had left my duffel back at the landing. I went out into the waiting room and there she was, anxiously staring down the hall and pacing back and forth.
“What’s your name?” she said, looking relieved as she came up to me.
“Jimmy,” I said. “Jimmy Spaulding.”
“Grace,” she said, holding out her hand to me. “Grace … Grace Adler. Sorry, still not used to my married name. It’s only been a week and I’m still getting used to it.”
Not Clark, then? Adler?
“I can’t thank you enough,” she said. “I don’t know what I would have done if … if …”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I hope you don’t mind me asking but …would you wait here with me until they … until he comes out?”
“Sure,” I said.
She had no money with her and I explained how I had none either because all I had was in my duffel back at the landing, but the nurses gave us coffee, so we sat and talked for a while.
She said her husband had sliced open an artery cutting wood at a cabin the two of them had rented down the lake from Pritchard’s Landing. “It was such a stupid accident,” she said. “Ran out of gas. It could have been so bad if you hadn’t been there.” We both stared at our cups and she started crying and talking, babbling to me, some stranger, like she had to tell someone how she had ended up there.
Her family had been against the marriage, she said, so they had married at City Hall. They didn’t want her marrying a Jew, no matter how promising Martin’s legal career was becoming, so the two of them had eloped, had done it on their own and gone off to the cabin for a honeymoon. Martin wanted to look into maybe buying one in the area. “Awful thing to have happen on a honeymoon, don’t you think?” she said, sniffling back tears and wiping her nose with a balled-up Kleenex. She was a beautiful woman, even with wet hair, running makeup, and blotchy skin.
“And how about you?” she said, sipping her coffee. “What’s your story, Jimmy? What were you doing out there?”
I was saved from lying by the nurse coming to take her in to see him, but she turned to me and said, “Don’t you go away now. I want to properly thank you. I can at least see that we get your belongings back to you.”
So I waited. She was in there a long time. Later, a cop showed up and asked the nurse on duty about the report of a man being brought in bleeding. I turned away and faced the wall as he went by. When he was past me I got up and headed out the door. That’s when his partner, waiting outside, collared me.
“Where d’you think you’re going, eh?” he said. “Been looking for you.”
I matched the description they had received earlier of a juvenile wanted for assault up in North Bay.
* * *
Fifty years later, Martin Adler’s funeral was a large affair held at a crazy expensive mansion-like funeral home in downtown Toronto. Sandra and I had to book the cheapest room we could find at the Sheraton. Parking our Civic cost what a meal would go for in a good restaurant in Owen Sound. Couldn’t help feeling like the poor relations among the crowd of financiers and lawyers who milled around after the funeral on the back lawn at the Adlers’ big place in Rosedale. Grace had been insistent, however, so we hung around the edge and sampled the sandwiches and squares, drank our beer and watched the Adler grandchildren skylark around the pool, smiling at them and thinking of our own grandkids.
I was running out of ways to explain who I was and how I was connected to Martin and Grace. I mostly stuck with, “I’m his mechanic. Take care of his cars.” Once I did, most of them would excuse themselves after a moment of politeness to go talk to people who had more money and better, more lucrative jobs than mine. Some of them stayed longer and talked cars while Sandra stood with her arm hooked in mine. I was glad she was there. Toronto always felt strange after spending most of our lives in Owen Sound raising our three kids and running the garage. We didn’t get away a lot.
Then Grace appeared. There was no shyness there. She threw her arms around me and then Sandra, saying, “Thank you so much for coming. I know it must be a trial coming all this way, but Martin and I talked about you in his last few weeks. He asked me to make sure you came.”
“He even planned out the visitors to his own funeral?” Sandy said.
“Well, you know my Martin. Always was one for …” Her voice cracked slightly, and she broke down then. I took her in my arms.
“Oh, James it’s going to be hard,” she said finally, wiping her eyes with what I saw was one of Martin’s monogrammed hankies. “I don’t know what I’ll do without him.”
“If there’s ever anything we can do …” I said, realizing as I said it that the words were what everybody said, but I also knew I genuinely meant it.
“It’s good of you to say so,” she replied, smiling through the tears. “And I intend to hold you to it.”
She had already said she intended to move to the farm they owned in the country outside of Chatsworth, just south of Owen Sound. The house in Toronto was too big. “I’m selling it and settling at the farm. That and the cottage will be enough for me … the kids have their own places now. You’ll visit me, I hope.”
“We always have, haven’t we?” Sandra said, touching her arm. The two women smiled at each other and I was happy that Grace had liked Sandy from the start, when I announced to her and Martin that I had met a girl I wanted to marry. That was nearly forty years and three kids ago.
I had always thought of myself as part son, part family friend, part general gofer, and part handyman to the Adlers. After that first stormy night at Pritchard’s Landing, our lives had intersected in so many ways.
* * *
I hadn’t expected to see them after I was arrested at the hospital in Bracebridge, and I was surprised when the two of them showed up at juvey court, Martin limping in and Grace following after with his briefcase and my duffel. He asked to meet with me—his ‘client’, he called me in front of the judge—in order to represent my interests.
The judge and the cops and Helmut and Marthe had been surprised by that, but Martin had spoken briefly with the judge, explaining who he was, and then, when we three were alone, he started questioning me.
“Why did you threaten them?” he asked.
“Got tired of bein’ knocked around,” I said, frowning at the dir
ectness of his questions.
“They’re not allowed to do that, you know, that’s abuse,” he replied. “Tell me, Jimmy, they ever make you work for them?”
I described working at Marthe’s brother’s farm.
“They pay you?” he asked.
On hearing I worked for free he glanced at Grace, nodded and said, “Okay, let me see what I can do.”
He made short work of my foster parents. I found out that day that smacking around foster kids and using them for free labour was frowned upon by the Children’s Aid. The judge said he intended to place me with another couple and confronted the Reiners, asking if they still wanted to charge me, because if they did, he was sure Mr. Adler would be filing abuse charges. Helmut fumed silently, casting vicious looks my way. At least Marthe had the decency to act all sheepish. The court case disappeared as fast as the Reiners left the courtroom.
Grace and Martin asked the judge for temporary custody and arranged for the Children’s Aid to find foster parents in Toronto. I wasn’t surprised when it turned out to be them. Somewhere during those happy months they were the ones I told of my dream to work as a mechanic. Without a second thought they found a good technical high school down there and then a community college and an apprenticeship. I lived in their place until I moved out on my own.
Later, when I met Sandra, she wanted to be close to her parents in Owen Sound, so I found a garage that was up for sale; we got married and made a go of it. The Adlers’ huge wedding cheque paid for most of the buy-in on the business and Martin did the legal work then just as he did for our wills and mortgages and everything else. Both our families had kids and we laughed and celebrated holidays together, visited the cottage in summer, and gave each other presents. This bounty all grew from a decision I was allowed to remake on a stormy night fifty years ago, and I never had occasion to ask Grace how much she remembered of her other life until just last week.
“James, I wonder if you can come and help me with something next week,” she said one day over the phone. I was never ‘Jimmy’ to her. She always called me James. “Are you busy Thursday afternoon?”
“Well …” I hesitated. “I guess I can leave the garage for a day. Hardy and my apprentice can handle it while I’m gone. What do you need?”
“I wonder if you might be able to meet me at the farm. One o’clock, say?”
“Yeah, I can make it by one. What’s up?”
She hesitated, I guess fearing I might not want to come. “It’s just that Martin wanted his ashes spread at the cottage. I want you to be with me, that’s if Sandra will lend you to me for the afternoon. I know it’s illegal. Goodness me, a lawyer’s wife committing a crime!” She giggled.
“Of course,” I replied instantly. “I’ll pick you up.”
“Thank you.”
“Just you and me, then?”
“And Martin,” she said.
* * *
When I pulled in, she was waiting on the porch, holding her maroon purse with the worn clasp and her grey hair in a ponytail.
“All set to go?” I asked brightly.
“Just about,” she replied and walked by my car out to the shed. She unlocked the doors and I helped her push them aside and pull off the tarp, knowing exactly what she had in mind. The red Mustang sat gleaming in the light streaming in through the doors.
“Looks great, doesn’t she?” I said.
“Sure does. You two have kept her going for over fifty years. Did you realize it had been that long?”
“Martin loved this car. Told me he was never getting rid of her. They’ll have to pry it out of my dead hands, he said!” Immediately I realized how hurtful that might have sounded. “I-I’m sorry, Grace, I … that was thoughtless of me.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I know what you meant,” she said, setting aside my apology. “But there was a truth in it all the same.”
“What do you mean?”
She smiled that faraway smile. There were tears in her eyes and she blinked them away before turning to me. “It’s not in his will. All that we are going to do today, I mean. It was his private wish to have his ashes scattered at the cottage at Pritchard’s Landing and that you and I be the ones to do it. Don’t worry. You know Martin. Covered his tracks well as far as the legal side of things go. They think he’s in the cemetery in Mount Pleasant.”
“Well, after all he has done for me, I don’t care if it’s legal or not.”
“He loved you like a son. I hope you know that, James.”
“Yeah,” I said, the word almost strangling in my throat. I could feel tears welling in my eyes. Working on the car had brought Martin and I together. Over the years, we’d spent a lot of Saturdays on the red Mustang. It had been my secret penance for the crime I had committed in my ‘other life’ and my own way of thanking him.
She went around and opened the passenger door. Getting in, she said, “Time to go.”
I got in and she reached into her purse, but she paused as if sensing I’d chosen that moment to ask her. “Grace, did you ever think what our lives might have been if we hadn’t met that night at the landing?”
She paused, a glimmer of her smile playing at the corner of her lips. “Of course I have,” she began. “Things would have been very different. I’ve had dreams where he didn’t survive and you weren’t there. Nightmares, really. I ended up a bitter and miserable old woman.”
“What about me?” I wanted to know.
“You?” She chuckled. “Well, I don’t know, but somehow I knew things might not have turned out so well.”
I glanced down at my hands, turning them over to see the knuckles, thinking I might find LOVE and HATE roughly scratched into them with reform school ink, but saw only blank wrinkled skin.
“These are yours now,” she said, handing me the keys. “The ownership is signed over to you. It’s in the glove compartment. Martin wanted you to have her. So when we come back, you keep her. Be sure to take good care of her. I’ll want a ride every now and then, of course.”
When I drove out of the shed I stopped and got out to close the doors. Turning back to the Mustang, for just the most fleeting of moments, I saw a young, beautiful woman with brilliant auburn hair sitting in the passenger seat, but then the vision was gone, dissolved away into nothing.
We drove down her laneway and turned the Mustang east towards Pritchard’s Landing.
A Word on Michael Holden
Michael Holden is the author of The Duke's Moor, The Moor's Journey and the upcoming Nicholas Jones historical novels.
After a long career as a teacher of elementary students in Owen Sound, London, and Hanover Ontario, and an administrator in schools in Hanover and Paisley, Ontario, Michael worked as a tour manager for tours to New York, Quebec, and Ottawa.
Currently he works from home in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada as a freelance writer of mostly fictional works of historical fiction, literary fiction, and children's literature.
He is an avid tennis fan and player, and guitarist for The Screaming Neckties.
http://www.michaelholden.ca
Hereafter
by Samuel Peralta
September 15, 2006
THAT AUTUMN SHE’S BACK in Toronto, staying at her mom’s place, before deployment. At Queen’s Quay Terminal, her two girlfriends go inside to grab a coffee, to stave off the late afternoon chill. She stays outside to check in, but the phone at her mom’s rings four, five, six times, and she flips her phone closed before it goes to voice mail.
There’s a soft crush of wind, and she hugs herself in her jacket. Time for that coffee. She turns, and that’s when she sees him. All in black, reminding her of Steve Jobs with his turtleneck and slacks, except didn’t Steve wear Adidas, and oh my God doesn’t he remind her of that lead in the Bryan Singer movie, and—
He collapses, crumples on the ground. She runs up the steps to him, but already he’s pulling himself up, bracing himself against the wall of the terminal building.
Just as she reaches him
, he looks up, and their eyes meet. Suddenly, a feeling overcomes her: that this face is familiar, that she knows him, that they’ve met before. In his eyes there’s a similar flash of recognition.
At his feet, a glimmer catches her attention, and she picks it up. A silver medallion, in the shape of a spiral nautilus, on a chain. She holds it out to him. “Yours?” she asks.
He takes it, holding her hand for just a fraction of a moment too long. “Oh God, I hope so,” he says.
They break off, both now blushing. She’s just decided she should be running off, when his knees buckle again and he hits the pavement. This time she has to pull him up and lean him against the wall herself. Nothing on his breath. Clean-shaven.
“I’m sorry,” he says, when he’s recovered. “It’s just been a long journey.”
She hesitates a bit before deciding. “Listen,” she says. “I think you need to sit down and get something to eat. Why don’t you join me and you can catch your breath? I’ll buy.” She holds out her hand. “I’m Caitlyn.”
“Sean Forrest,” he says. “Happy to meet you.”
Rotini in marinara sauce at the restaurant inside, and she’s chattering away, about the closing of The Lord of The Rings stage show at the Princess of Wales Theatre, about Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest book, about Spenser and the difference between Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets—and wouldn’t he like to read one she’s written, which she happened to carry with her?—and when her phone rings, an hour has passed. It isn’t her mom, it’s her friends—wondering where in the world is she?
She tells them she’ll catch up with them later at the club, turns back to him, and they pick it up as if she’d never left off.
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