If you’ve lost someone close, this book is for you.
You know what I am talking about.
In memory of a friend and actor,
Stéphane Pominville,
who taught me
how to enjoy every second on stage.
To my mother,
who taught me
how to make my bed and how to love.
To Marc and Luc, my mentors,
who taught me
how to use utensils properly.
PREFACE
Be careful. Nothing lasts forever.
– The old lady with whom I shared
my turkey sandwich on the bus.
I’ve always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying, “Ain’t that the truth.”
– Quincy Jones
I thought I would never survive it. How do you survive something you think is all your fault? If only I had shoveled the snow when my father asked me to, or walked the dog when he told me to, or kept my room as neat as a ship’s cabin like he wanted me to. If only I had been a better son. I went as deeply into the darkness as it is possible to go. But I climbed back into the light. I survived, and this is my story.
1 | SHOCK
Though the June night was hot, my hands were icy as I fumbled for my keys at the front door. Mr. Enrique, my Spanish teacher, leaned out of his car window. “Good luck, son,” he yelled as he drove off down the dark street.
My mother opened the creaky wooden door just as I turned the key.
“Maman, what’s wrong?” I asked.
She looked ashen, numb. “It’s over. Point final.” When my mother says point final, everybody snaps to attention, even the dog, so I didn’t resist when she took my arm and led me to her bedroom. It was the only place in the house where there was an air conditioner, though it hadn’t been turned on since my father had lost his job. The stairs felt like they would never end. No stairway to heaven, that’s for sure. My mother closed the bedroom door very carefully behind her as if the sky–or the air conditioner–might fall on me.
“I have bad news, sweetheart.” Her blue eyes were blurry with tears.
Sweetheart. The last time I could remember her calling me that was when we were both crammed into a toilet cubicle in the ladies’ room at Eaton’s because I was too young to go by myself and she was coaxing me to hurry.
I sat down on the big rumpled bed, feeling like Louis XVI waiting to go to the guillotine, or Louis Riel waiting to be hanged.
1992. I hate that year. Queen Elizabeth described it as an annus horribilus because Windsor Castle burned down and Charles and Diana separated. That was the year that George Bush got sick on a visit to Japan and vomited on the Japanese Prime Minister. Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina declared their own republic. What else? In June my father hanged himself in the attic.
After that, the world did not stop, although that seemed odd to me at the time. Here’s the short version of what happened after.
Summer: I spent the summer more or less in my room with the curtains drawn. When it got too hot, I took my guitar out on the stairway that runs down the back of our house, where nobody could see me. My Aunt Sophie took charge of my little brother, Luc. I think they went to the park or the swimming pool or to the doughnut shop a lot. I can’t say for sure, because I didn’t notice. My mother left the house every morning and went to work at the post office. When she got home she scrubbed every possible surface in the house, and when she was finished she started scrubbing all over again. After days of whining to be let out and then whining some more to be let back in, our dog, Sputnik, spent a lot of time under the porch asleep.
Autumn: I went back to school. Luc went to kindergarten in the mornings and to day care at the church down the street in the afternoons. When he was home, he stuck to my side like a burr. Maman worked, scrubbed, and yelled at me, Luc, and the dog.
Winter: You should know that Montréal in winter is cold and dark and snowy. We were three strangers living side by side in an old house on a steep street. Christmas came and went. Maman’s scrubbing lost momentum, and she spent a lot of time staring at the fire in the fireplace. By January the street had grown so narrow from snowdrifts and buried parked cars that I felt like an Arctic explorer when I made the trek home from school. Luc wanted me to carry him whenever we were outside. He was so heavy in his snowsuit and boots that I thought my back would break.
Spring: I had my sixteenth birthday Maman got a better job. Luc talked to Sputnik as they played catch in the backyard. The darkness receded.
I think that about wraps up the nuts and bolts, but as I said, I can’t be 100 percent sure. My heart lived a different, terrible life of its own that year. Time stretched and shrank and grief took up residence inside me. It was a living, breathing creature that I could not control. This isn’t the story of what I did that year. It’s the story of what I felt.
I was on a school trip to New York with fifteen other kids and three teachers. I was wild to go, but because money was so tight at home, I made a deal with the principal that I’d help the caretaker for a half hour every day. For months I’d mopped the halls and emptied trash cans and pried gum off desks, but I got to New York.
We had a lot lined up: visits to Rockefeller Center and Times Square and the Metropolitan Museum to see the gigantic Temple of Dendur set up in one of the rooms. That was strange: this ancient building that human hands like mine had made over two thousand years ago and thousands of miles away, standing quietly in a museum while vendors hawked pretzels and hot dogs outside. I bought a souvenir for my father, a Rangers jersey. The Rangers were his favorite hockey team, after the Montréal Canadiens. He hated the Toronto Maple Leafs.
New York was great, but I was homesick. I love Montreal as if it all belongs to me, personally: it’s my Olympic Stadium, my smoked meat sandwiches, my old brick house halfway up its narrow, tree-lined street, my friends, my music. I missed Luc, even though he woke me up at dawn every day to play with his Lego and Hot Wheels, not something I’d recommend as a quiet way to ease into the day.
The telephone rang in the hotel room. We were on the tenth floor but we could hear the buzz of morning traffic through the open window.
“Hey, Francis, it’s your mother,” Houston was sprawled on the slippery nylon bedspread flipping through a guide to the city. I had been flossing my teeth, something not to be skipped, especially when you’ve just eaten three hot dogs with sauerkraut, and you haven’t brushed your teeth for three days in a row. Gross. I thought Maman might be calling because she was missing me, or she was worried that I was too hot or too cold or something. My mother is a champion worrier.
“Francis, you have to come back to Montreal as soon as you can,” she said. “Mr. Enrique will drive you.”
“Did Grandpa have a heart attack?” A month doesn’t go by without a Grandpa Heart Attack Scare. I’m trying to make it sound funny, but it’s not.
“Just come home,” said Maman.
“Is Luc okay?” Luc is constantly swallowing his toys. That may sound funny too, but it’s not. It must really hurt to swallow a miniature car.
“Luc is fine. I’ll be waiting for you. I love you.”
She hung up. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to worry, but I didn’t. I simply pulled my backpack out of the closet and packed my U2 and Jacques Brel CDs, and the camera that my mother had given me for my last birthday. I’d had to rescue it from Aunt Sophie who threatened to throw it away when I took a picture of her on Christmas Day barfing on our molting green shag living room rug.
Mr. Enrique is, to say the least, an eccentric driver. He is also the weirdest man on earth. All the way to Montréal, he talked about his blind cat, Rococo. He told me that he would eat a human being before he’d eat his cat. Some choice
. I don’t remember much else about the drive–just Rococo and Mr. Enrique and the only Spanish phrases that I could remember, Dos cervezas por favor! with the upside down exclamation mark–very hard to find on a keyboard, by the way.
Your father is dead. That four-word sentence, spoken in my mother’s soft, flat voice, changed my life forever. Mine. Hers. My brother’s. My father had died. DIED in red capital letters, as enormous as the billboards on Times Square. No, bigger, more excessive, than anything I had seen in New York. A nuclear bomb exploding in my chest. Ten thousand guillotines chopping off ten thousand heads with a terrifying metallic clamor. The Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrating in flames in the sky over Texas. An electric shock pulsing through my veins and bones. My mind skittered around for some place to hide from the pain. There was nowhere.
That year was full of surprises and this was the first: sorrow hurts like hell. I swear my heart stopped beating. My throat constricted, and my belly hurt as if a wolf had eaten my guts.
I felt like a computer that had gone haywire, with images crazily chasing one another across the screen. My father would never wrestle with me again on the disgusting green living room rug that hid Cheerios and dog hair and the odd coin in its shaggy tufts. We wouldn’t stuff ourselves with Smarties and jelly beans and then play hand after hand of poker on Sunday afternoons. He wouldn’t pretend to be mad when he told me to turn off the lights in my bedroom after midnight when I was reading Superman comics. We would never watch hockey on TV on Saturday nights, slumped together on the old brown couch, eating popcorn.
I heard myself bawl from deep in my soul, if there’s such a thing as a soul. My mother gathered me in her arms. I had almost forgotten the warmth they had once given me. When you are fifteen, you don’t do this kind of thing anymore. I wanted her to hold me forever.
2 | ANGER
When I woke up the next morning, everything seemed the same for a moment. I was in my own room lying on familiar faded cowboy-patterned sheets in a bed with a headboard like a ship’s wheel. The walls were as dry and cool as a wintry Arctic desert. I looked at the ceiling, freshly painted, thinking of an infinite white sea. I wanted to dive into it, not to drown so much as to freeze in it, to freeze time.
My guitar was leaning against the wall. It was a Christmas present from my father. He had taught me three songs that first day. My desk was in its usual place under a shelf of books neatly arranged by theme. The desk had belonged to my father when he was a kid and his initials were carved into one corner. I had cleared off all my junk from school before I left for New York. The only thing on it was a photo of Papa and me, grinning at the camera with a big bowl of candy in front us, holding our poker hands to our chests. I remember when Aunt Sophie took it. Maman had just cleared Sunday lunch from the table–an old table made from pine and Luc was singing to himself as he played with plastic margarine tubs on the kitchen floor. There was a pot on the floor, because the bathroom pipe was leaking water through the ceiling. I must have been twelve years old.
The first thing that hit me was a wave of guilt so enormous that I thought I would die too. Why did I leave my father for that damned trip? I knew Papa had been depressed since he’d lost his job a couple of years ago. He’d started working on the boats before his sixteenth birthday and he loved the sea and the broad St. Lawrence. One day he was loading cargo on a slippery deck when he wrecked his back. Two operations didn’t help much. He must have tried to get hired on again at least a thousand times, but people told him he was too old and that the work was too hard. That was the beginning of the end. He was never the same after he lost that job. As far as my father was concerned, a man who couldn’t work wasn’t a man.
It wasn’t as if we’d had no warning. At breakfast on a stifling June day last year, Maman announced that she and Aunt Sophie were going shopping, and that Luc was coming with them. “You’re such a big boy now, mon cher.” She pushed his hair off his forehead. “You need big-boy clothes for the summer.” He looked unconvinced. She headed off a tantrum with a promise of ice cream when they were finished and turned to Papa.
“Ben, why don’t you come with us?”
“Darling, you’ve asked me a hundred times. I’ll be fine here. You know I hate shopping.” Papa didn’t look up from his crossword puzzle.
“Francis, you’ll come right home from school?” She gave me a worried look.
“Sure.” I knew she didn’t want Papa to be alone.
Anyway, Papa was on his own that day. When I got home I found him lying on the cracked linoleum with an empty glass of milk and the vial for his pain pills beside him. There was a piece of paper on the kitchen table, held down by the salt shaker as if it might fly away:
Sorry, I’m going somewhere better. I’m fed up with my life.
I felt like he had slapped my face. My hands shook as I dialed 911. I knelt down beside him while we waited for the ambulance and turned his face to me.
“How could you, Papa?”
He tried to answer but he sounded drunk, as if he had a big potato in his mouth. It must have been the effect of the pills. I couldn’t understand him at all. After eight minutes and ten seconds, the ambulance came, and they took him to the hospital. They told me that he was going to be fine, that he was a lucky man because I had found him. Not to worry. But I did.
I worried about him from that moment on, and I guess I’ll never stop worrying, even though he’s dead and beyond pain.
After I found Papa lying on the floor, I promised myself that I would never let him out of my sight again. All that summer, I followed him everywhere. When he was taking a walk on Rue St-Denis, I followed him. When he was in the garage, I hung out on the back porch where I could see him. When he went to Canadian Tire–he and I were both big-time browsers there–I went with him. I thought that as long as I kept him in sight I could save him. By the time school started again he seemed better, and by the end of the school year when I went to New York and left him alone, I thought he was fine.
Maman knocked on the door, but she didn’t open it.
“Come for breakfast, sweetheart.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Please. Come.”
I’d been home three days, and each morning the realization that my father was dead struck me like a slap. He couldn’t die like that. He just couldn’t. Point final Living without my father would be like losing an arm or leg. Suddenly, I had this image of myself when I was Luc’s age. I was in the garage while my father tinkered with the lawn mower. I had caught a fly and I was about to tear its legs off. Papa stopped me. The scene came back to me in a flood of pain.
I buried my face in my pillow to choke my sobs. How would I get through this day? I heard the door creak as Maman opened it. Our house is so old that it’s always making noises. As long as I can remember, my bedroom door has creaked. Maman’s face was pale and her hair was pulled back into a ragged ponytail.
“Honey, come and eat something. It’s been so long.”
“Not hungry,” I replied.
“Then just have a glass of orange juice.” She sat on the edge of my bed and took my hand. I turned my head to the wall.
“Why did Papa have to die? Why not Grandpa? He’s always saying that he wants to go to heaven to be with Grandma.”
“Life is unfair. I don’t have answers for you.” Maman squeezed my hand.
She went back downstairs. With a huge effort I swung my legs over the side of the bed and pulled on a T-shirt and shorts. The backpack was where I had dropped it the night I’d come home. I found the Rangers T-shirt, wadded it into a ball, and stuffed it into the bottom drawer of my dresser.
Luc was sitting in his superhero pajamas at the wobbly kitchen table. It had lost one of its legs, and Papa had replaced it with a piece of broom handle. Luc glanced up and tried to smile. When he looked back to the cereal in his bowl, he seemed not to recognize it. I wasn’t hungry either. I didn’t think I could keep anything down. I ran through my mental list of favorite foods to see
if I could imagine being able to swallow any of them, but even the thought of double chocolate cake made me want to gag. Maman handed me two pills, and I tried to drink a glass of water.
Though Luc was sitting right there trying to sink his Cheerios with his spoon, and Maman was methodically watering the row of herbs she grew in old cans on the windowsill, and Sputnik was at the kitchen door shaking his collar, desperate to go out, the kitchen echoed with emptiness.
“Come on, Sputnik,” Maman held the door open for him. “No walk for you this morning.” The dog had been another great Christmas present. I’d called him Sputnik because it was easy for Luc to say. The dog’s toenails clicked on the floor as he went alone into the yard.
“Will we have to move?” I’m not sure why I asked, but it seemed desperately important at the time. There would be a lot of desperate, disconnected questions from me that year.
“I don’t know, Francis. Don’t think about that now.” Maman was washing the dishes like a robot. Her face was blank, as if someone had drained all the life out of her. When she finally stopped–I can’t say she finished, she just ran down–she wiped the chipped counter with the dish cloth. She folded it carefully before she spoke again.
“We’ll be beautiful today, my loves, because it’s the last time we’ll see your father.”
“I’m staying here. I’m not going to the funeral.” The very idea of burying my father seemed preposterous.
“You are coming with us, Francis. Point final” She opened the kitchen door to let Sputnik back in. The dog wagged his tail and cocked his head at Maman. Her face crumpled. She sank into a chair, sobbing.
I wore an old black shirt, black pants and a black tie. The tie felt like a noose. Luc was dressed in the suit I had worn years ago when I was a ring bearer at my cousin’s wedding. It was too big for him, but it was black. Maman had no black summer clothes but she’d found an old wool skirt and a black sweater with small satin bows on each shoulder. We sat down at the kitchen table to wait for Aunt Sophie.
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