She didn’t get up again until evening, and after forcing down some crackers at my insistence, she started tidying. She fetched a broom and swept the kitchen, attacking the hard-to-reach crack between the fridge and the wall. She recovered cobwebs and hair, greeting cards, crystallized bits of orange rind, the emptied shells of insects. She washed the few dishes left in the sink, and then retrieved an already clean baking pan from its drawer under the stove and attacked it with steel wool, scrubbing for a long time.
“I’ll be back soon,” I told her, leaving behind me the harsh sounds of her work.
It was by this time getting close to twilight, and as I walked the street lamps came on. I visited the playground where I had spent time with Aisha, now a nighttime scene of lights and shadows. I made wide circles around the Park at least five times, and I crossed the Lawrence Avenue bridge. I was disoriented, lightheaded with having not eaten all day, and when I stared down into the unseen depths of the great glacial valley, it felt like I could fall. A transport trailer flew past, its wake pulling and pushing me like a flimsy non-living thing. I gripped the edge of the bridge for balance, and this steadied me back to life.
A bird of some sort, maybe a pigeon, clattered the bridge, trying to find a place to roost on its underside. It tried to gain a foothold but slipped and smacked its wings a few more times against the concrete before giving up. It flapped up above street level and across the middle floors of a high-rise before flying in the direction of my home.
—
I hadn’t left Mother alone for this long since Francis’s death, and I started hurrying with concern even before I spotted the small crowd of neighbours grouped outside our unit. I stopped in their midst, awaiting an explanation, but none was offered. A vague anxiety in the air.
“Mrs. Henry…?” I began.
“Your mother,” she said.
And then I heard it. A loud bump coming from inside our unit. The creak and dull scrape of something being moved about in the living room. A shattering, things spilling on the floor, sharp little bullets of sound.
Another bump. A clatter of something metal hitting the floor.
I pushed open the door slowly, the security chain dangling. It was stifling hot and at first I couldn’t make out much from the white shock of light of the fridge left open, but I could tell all the furniture had been moved. The couch and chairs had been pushed to the edges, the rug rolled sloppily and stood up in a corner. The kitchen table had been moved, its chairs on their sides.
She was kneeling by the couch, a hammer in her hand, banging at something, her face turned away from me. I called her name. Her eyes wide at me in the dark. These really wide eyes. All the drawers and cupboards in the kitchen area were yawning empty, and the few canned and boxed things within had been piled on the linoleum, garbage sweepings, broken glass and dishes, pairs of good shoes.
“It’s such a mess,” she explained.
“Mother. Please,” I whispered.
“Who leaves their home in such a mess?”
—
From that moment, Mother became someone I could care for. I had the everyday urgencies of watching her, making sure she ate and tried to sleep. She became a convenient excuse when people came to visit or to try to offer condolences, and when the boys from Desirea’s returned again to speak with me, I could angrily explain that they were disturbing us. They never returned.
Even the police interview about the death of my brother could seem to me, right then, a distraction, a conversation too late and somehow all beside the point. Mother was forced to come with me because I was still not quite eighteen, and we both sat dazed and nodding at the questions asked by those in authority. Could I clarify on the words exchanged in the shop that day? Could I remember the precise language used? Could I help affirm what others had already described as the actions leading up to the discharge of the weapon? I nodded, not always able to listen. I kept looking at my mother, this first excursion for her since the funeral. She was staring down at the tea that she had been given, growing cold now in her hands. She refused to meet anyone’s eyes, to be moved by anything discussed or said in this room.
What else happened? I remember the buzzing of the fluorescent lights, and that the air conditioning was cranked, encasing us, finally, in cold. I remember the silences in that room much more than the talk. But also their questions. Would you agree that Francis had a bit of a reputation? Did he sometimes exhibit unpredictable moods? Would you agree, Michael, that your brother possessed a history of violence?
—
There was Aisha, of course. She came to see us again, but when I began to close the door she jammed her foot and then pushed her way in. She set bags of food on the kitchen counter, two of them, smelling spiced and peppery, the paper stained almost translucent with grease. Roti, no doubt. I explained that Mother was sleeping, explained that we couldn’t speak. I explained that the smell of food nauseated me, and she nodded.
“The library,” she said.
We walked to it in silence, and when I entered the building, I felt the attention. I must have looked like crap, I hadn’t showered in days, and there were stares, but Aisha didn’t seem to care. She led us to our usual seats, and she asked how Mother was doing. She asked how I was doing. I nodded, and she waited before trying again. She said that she’d tried to contact the boys from Desirea’s. She’d tried to find out what had happened. What had really happened. Most of the boys had fled, and the few remaining had nothing to say. Jelly had been released, but he’d vanished into the city.
“This can’t be the end,” she said. “We still need to talk.”
I looked away from her. Around us were people reading, a girl looking into a computer screen, her face painted blue by the light.
Francis had always protected me. It was his instinct. He saw the vulnerability, understood it all too well. But in that final moment in Desirea’s, he had tried to protect another. When a cop with his hand on his holstered gun grabbed Jelly and tried to pull him away, Francis had panicked. “Don’t touch him,” he’d said, reaching to still the weapon. It was a gesture with history, but unreadable by those around him holding power. The authorities had investigated, interviewed witnesses, pronounced their conclusions.
“They called it lawful,” I told Aisha. And what else could we do but each look away?
—
There are many ways a person can flee. Aisha left for university. And my brother’s friends each, in their own ways, fled. But of course, you can’t ever really flee. You’ll forever run the risk of being spotted, if only for a second. Once, a couple years after the shooting, reaching for juice in the refrigerator of a convenience store, I noticed a young man reaching too, and when our eyes met, he nodded, the sort of nod that says not only excuse me but also I see you, I recognize. And only after he had left, I realized it was Kev. A year or two later, someone on a bus looked up at me from her newspaper, that awkward look of memory on the face before me. Gene. Years after Desirea’s was reopened as the second Happy Chicken in the neighbourhood, I was leaving a drugstore with a prescription for Mother when a man held the door open for me. At first he pretended not to see or know me, but as I stepped through the doorway, he swallowed and said, “Hey, Michael. You okay?” He wore a suit jacket, the kind they make you wear in retail. And his name tag didn’t say “Raj,” or “Rajinder,” but “Hello, I’m Roddy.”
Last summer, Dru knocked on the door. He was visiting his sister, still in the neighbourhood, and beside him was a boy of maybe five, his son, the fattest eyes you’ve ever seen, although already he could posture, chinning me a quick hello in a way that made me laugh. We spent an hour together in the nearby Tim Hortons, drinking those slushy coffee drinks, beads of cold on their plastic cups. I ordered a doughnut for his son, and I kept watching, mesmerized, as the kid forked off all the icing to eat first. We joked just a bit about Desirea’s, but when I asked Dru if he ever thought of opening another shop, he shook his head. “This one keeps me busy,” he sa
id, gesturing at his boy. He asked me carefully about my mother, and when I said, “She’s getting better,” he tried his best to return my smile. We finished our coffees and Dru said he had to get back to his sister’s, he had the kid to feed, and, you know, other responsibilities.
“I understand,” I said.
“You take care, Michael. Okay?”
I said I would. I had my own responsibilities. I had my mother, and I had my job. I had free time at the library. I have lived, just like others, which is something.
—
Not long before Aisha’s return, I was sitting in the library when I heard a man say, “Do you mind?” I shifted away from the empty chair beside me, my eyes still on the page of my book. When I noticed the man was taking a long time to lower himself into his seat, I turned to look. Like other neighbours, Aisha’s father had tried to offer his condolences when Francis was killed, but he had respected my obvious desire for space, and we never spoke further. But now, as I looked at him, he seemed suddenly to have aged, his skin crinkled, his hair come out in patches. I’d heard rumours that he wasn’t doing well, but I didn’t expect this. We both pretended to read but kept catching each other’s eyes. And eventually Samuel put down his book.
He told me that he had wanted to speak with me for a long time, and that he was sorry that he hadn’t done so earlier. He was moving away soon, he might not have another chance to speak. He just wanted me to know that in the months before Francis died, perhaps a year or more, he and Francis had met to listen to music. It began one day when he was returning from work, passing by Francis while humming an old tune under his breath, and Francis just as quietly named the song. “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” this youth of the Park had somehow managed to pronounce. After a moment of quiet, Samuel surprised himself by inviting Francis over to listen to his records, and even more surprisingly, Francis had showed up a couple days later.
“We ended up spending only a few afternoons together, just listening to old music. Barely even talking. We must have played Nina Simone’s version of ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ at least a dozen times. Her sweet sad voice. He always laughed, your brother, whenever I tried to sing that song. It became our joke. Our secret too, I think. I’m not sure if even Aisha knew. How could we explain it to others? A man like me, a boy like Francis. Who would have guessed at a connection?”
I could picture Francis sitting with a father, though not his father, listening together to Nina Simone and maybe Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. I could imagine, too, on a later visit, when the mood and sound were right, Francis telling something to this father who was not his father. A declaration that he, my brother, understood the old music, that heritage of love, because he felt it himself. He loved his family, and also his friends. He loved a young man named Jelly.
I must have worn something like embarrassment on my face. This vision I’d allowed myself. Fantasy more than memory. Samuel might have read my expression, and maybe he too felt embarrassed for whatever he had now attempted, because he chose then to rise unsteadily to leave.
—
“He died two weeks ago,” Aisha told me over the phone, that day before her return. “He’d been staying in a hospice in Milton, and I didn’t know. He never told me. He never said.”
There was quiet on the phone. Not quite silence: someone breathing.
“Please visit,” I said. “Come home to the Park.”
—
It’s morning now, and in a section of the emergency ward a distance away from Mother, the doctor is privately delivering the official diagnosis. The preliminary assessments hold up. Aside from the bruised ribs and hairline fracture, there’s nothing else wrong with her. There was a high blood alcohol count, he continues, which may have contributed to disorientation when attempting to cross the street. A simple mistake, most likely, although there remains the question of her psychological state. She will need a support network. Has she been taking medicine? Do you have a family physician? I nod at the last question, lying.
When he leaves, I close my eyes. In the books on complicated grief, there are sometimes frank words. Some deaths, they explain, will never simply be “gotten over.” Some mourners will never quite again “be themselves.” I spend a good half-hour alone, haunting a hallway of the hospital, until I notice I’m making some visitors uncomfortable. I return to Mother’s stretcher, and she’s sitting up now, wearing a hospital gown as neatly as she can make it seem. When she reads my face, she smooths her hair, sits up straight, the paper beneath her making soft crinkling sounds.
“It is a new day,” she says firmly.
I give her the space and privacy to put on her clothes, helping her only with the buttons of her blouse at the end. I borrow a wheelchair, although Mother is reluctant to sit in it, and we wheel carefully through the emergency ward to the main entrance where we can catch a bus. Shifts are changing from night to day, and passing us are cleaners and nurses’ assistants and security guards. We pass the first window we’ve seen in hours, and Mother is right, it is a new day. It’s bright outside.
In the atrium, I’m surprised to see them. And then somehow not surprised. They’re precisely the sort to ignore a command to go away. They are exactly what my mother would call harden.
Aisha rises when she sees us, and she taps Jelly, who does the same, carrying a very small bunch of flowers in his hand. They are blue and pretty and wild.
—
“Can we visit it soon?” Aisha asks. “It’s supposed to be warm this weekend.”
We’re all at home now, the four of us, and the room is filled with the smell of a fish poached in garlic and onions. Mrs. Henry has dropped off fruit and hard-dough bread, and Jelly has been improvising again in the kitchen. I’m having seconds of a bitter green that is delicious, fried rice with each grain sitting miraculously on its own. We have eaten together, and there is music low on the record player, and we are here and for the moment together.
“What do you say?” Aisha presses. “The pathway down should be clear enough to get close to the creek. We’ll be sure to go slow, Ruth. Maybe we could borrow a wheelchair. Jelly? Are you in?”
He nods from the record player, flipping through Mother’s old albums, selecting one and checking for scratches. He cues it up, and when the low voice of a woman cuts the silence, Mother frowns slightly, as if in pain. Jelly fumbles to dial it down, but Mother shakes her head. Gestures upward.
“Volume,” she says.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Decide,
Will you share the labor, share the work?
—Antigone
I don’t remember that frail morning, how could I?
—Dionne Brand, Thirsty
This short book took me a long time to write. I have benefitted profoundly from the editorial acuity of Martha Kanya-Forstner and the professional guidance of Jackie Kaiser. My warm thanks also to Jared Bland, Lara Hinchberger, Terri Nimmo, and Shaun Oakey. I must especially acknowledge the inspiring faith of the late Ellen Seligman.
I am grateful to all my friends. But for essential feedback on this book, I thank Phanuel Antwi, Darcy Ballantyne, Wayde Compton, Kyo Maclear, Leslie Sanders, Madeleine Thien, Ian Williams, and Lise Winer. For advice on specific details, I thank Michael Bucknor, Daniel Coleman, Colette Colligan, Brady Cranfield, Janet Fitzsimmons, Kelly Josephs, Christine Kim, Michelle Levy, Stephen Murray, Beth Piatote, and Deanna Reder.
The Vancouver Public Library provided me with free space to write. A grant from the Canada Council for the Arts allowed me a precious break from teaching. The Banff Centre and the Literary Colloquium Berlin offered me short retreats. I am honoured by the interest and good wishes of my students and colleagues at Simon Fraser University.
I acknowledge the Indigenous lands that I live upon. I acknowledge the many stories that remain to be heard.
I am here and able to write because of the journeys, labours, and love of my parents, Rawlins and Claudette. I am grateful for the kindness and hospitality of my extended family. I am susta
ined by the wisdom of my brother, Mark, and by the creativity of my children, Maya and Skye.
For companionship in the weather, I thank Dionne Brand, Abdi Ousman, Christina Sharpe, and Rinaldo Walcott. A special thanks, once more, to Leslie Sanders. My deepest, heartfelt gratitude goes to my partner and first reader, Sophie McCall.
Austin Clarke believed in me. Thank you, Austin. Rest in peace.
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