The Longest Year

by Daniel Grenier

  The process of growing up alone began for Thomas when his father left. With increasing frequency he retreated into his igneous imagination, holding onto Laura like a buoy, but instinctively understanding that she had no desire to be reduced to this. He never saw anyone, barely had any friends, but his mother was changing. She’d started wearing tight jeans and contact lenses. She was pretty, why not? He couldn’t blame her. Albert’s leaving wouldn’t change a thing for Thomas, wouldn’t alter his personality one iota. There would be, starting now, one fewer thing in his life, something whose importance he recognized, and whose absence he felt often, but which had not “taken a weight off his shoulders,” as he heard his mother say on the phone to her friend Mary.

  Laura started wearing her old clothes again. They had been sitting at the back of her closet for years, and if Thomas had seen them before he had no memory of it. There were jeans torn at the knees, blouses with golden spangles. He went to bed early so he would be in good shape the next day, he didn’t want to fall asleep at his desk, and just before falling asleep, feeling uneasy and unconsciously listening to the sound of his breathing in his nose, he’d hear his mother leaving through the kitchen door. There was the sound of the rusty screen door followed by the clacking of high heels on the porch, and then she’d be outside and the car would start. During that period, the last years of Laura’s life, she started going out at night more often. But she never once missed having breakfast with her son. These breakfasts were like silent extensions of their evenings, as if they had spent the night together waiting for the sun to come up and were a little hoarser but just going about their routine. Laura felt no need to justify herself.

  Evenings with his mom were spent in one-way conversation on the living room couch, whole evenings when she would go right on talking, as if he had answered. She’d say, Yeah, you’re right, I know, it’s crazy but . . . She’d say, What was it you wanted to know again? I’ve lost the thread. Okay, wait here and I’ll explain it. She would speak for them both and Thomas never complained, why would he? They spent whole afternoons together and he enjoyed the feeling of their shared weight flattening the sofa cushions, Laura with her legs folded under her, Thomas sitting cross-legged facing her, a big glass of milk in hand. He got back from school at quarter to five and she’d come home from work exhausted, always exhausted, at six thirty, and heat up their dinner in the microwave and give Mary a call to let her know she’d gotten home okay, sighing with a mixture of comfort and fatigue whose exact meaning he could never pin down. They’d drink their milk under the dim lights and talk about another family that had erupted into conflict one day before he was born, but on account of him, in a sense, or rather of the idea they held at the time of who he would be.

  When he moved to his grandparents’, Thomas took control of his solitude. It was so normal, in a sense: he was balanced, grounded, and happy to go with the flow as he grew into a highly confident young man with no serious complexes. He didn’t feel much affinity with his guardians but did have a vague sense of respect for this couple whose posture showed signs of age yet who remained imposing in so many ways. Grampa Wright and Grandma Josephine weren’t the monstrous cretins Laura had made them out to be. Thomas could see what his father had tried to warn him against, but also came to appreciate certain qualities below the surface: Wright’s discretion, his seriousness, and a rectitude that reassured him and meshed with his own personality. These qualities reminded him of his own father. Their faces looked nothing alike, of course, but there was something about his grandfather, the way he had of sitting in the rocking chair staring out the window, into the distance, in which Albert lived on despite himself. For the first few days Thomas had feared his grandfather, but force of habit eventually prevailed. By eighteen he barely spoke to his grandparents, who were little more to him than twin pillars holding up the house. Were they to leave, it would likely fall down. He respected them, in a sense. Their paths crossed on the landing of the stairs or, often, in the dining room, and Thomas would watch them going about their lives, supporting each other; he admired them, in a way. It was something like admiration. Whenever he thought of his mother he felt bad, but he couldn’t help it. There were things he couldn’t help admiring about them.

  Like the way Wright walked with his back so straight the top of his head nearly touched the hall chandelier, despite his seventy-two years and the dozen other reasons it might have found to bend. Watching his grandfather from the corner of his eye reminded Thomas that seventy-two wasn’t that old, though the pure-white hair and carefully trimmed moustache told another story. Wright walked around his home with confidence and composure. He neither slid nor shuffled. He may have stepped down as head pastor of the Methodist congregation a decade ago, but he still attended worship every Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday, in a massive Buick with plush seats and a woman’s voice that reminded him to fasten his seatbelt. Very early in the dark September morning, before dawn even, long before Thomas left for high school, Wright would wake up, shave, and comb his hair with the black plastic comb he carried on his person at all times. Thomas, half asleep, would hear the drawn-out rasping of him clearing his throat a single time in the bathroom. He heard Wright descend the main staircase, leave the house without breakfast, and start his car. At times like these Thomas imagined how his adolescent mother would have felt, in the presence of this upright man who wrote articles for the church newsletter, a man she wasn’t yet old enough to truly understand. There were articles on abortion and on the use of contraception by young girls such as herself. Wright’s output had earned him a certain renown, you could see black-and-white photos of his face in print, it made her proud at first, and later ashamed. Thomas listened to him leaving, the car’s mechanical voice alerting him that the door was ajar, until it finally shut with a dry muffled clack, and he had a hard time, a great deal of difficulty, reconciling the feeling of shame that had been passed down to him, at being the grandchild of this devout, intolerant racist, with the affection he felt for this man who was so stable and firmly grounded, with such an unyielding spine.

  Nor did Josephine quite match Thomas’s image of her. It might have been how much she looked like his mother, a resemblance so striking he was always slightly sad in her presence, as she must have been when she looked in the mirror, Thomas imagined. She dressed elegantly in dark clothing that was always perfectly accessorized, and there was no brusqueness in her manners. She spoke in a composed tone of voice and there was a hint of worry in her eyes that never quite left, even when she smiled. Thomas liked talking to her, it reminded him of the one-sided conversational style favoured by his mother. With Jo it was different: she let him talk, but anticipated what he would say. Hers was an unpleasant habit and a fascinating gift, one he found endlessly intriguing and never tired of putting to the test. They would sit down together for lunch, when Wright was out, eating and talking about everything and nothing, about school and the people they met and the encyclopedic knowledge they shared, and sometimes Jo would say the words he was about to use before they were out of his mouth. Sometimes she got the intonation wrong, or put the stress on the wrong syllable, said “I” when she meant “you,” let him be the one who had come up with the idea. It made no difference. She would say what he was about to, before he got to it, and then agree with him: Oh yes, you’re right, I know. Thomas would sit open-mouthed at the vapid obviousness of what she said, trying to remember whether his mother had done the same thing. He was sure it was different. When she wasn’t doing that, Jo would let him explain himself, but the way she nodded signalled something beyond mere approval or understanding; her nod confirmed that he had indeed said what he should, he hadn’t committed an error. They’d sit at the counter on backless wicker stools and stare at the wall above the stove like two sages who had uncovered some profound, long-lost meaning. Normally Jo was very, very calm, and Thomas liked watching her chin resting in the palm of her hand, elbows on the counter, an elegant, self-possessed woman whose
age was hard to guess and who called him “sweetheart” without a second thought. How could he resent her? She wasn’t hysterical, and when she held his gaze he saw no hypocrisy in her eyes.

  Thomas had slept in Laura’s old room since moving in with his grandparents. It was decorated with the blue and grey pennants of the Boyd Buchanan Buccaneers. His mother had attended Boyd Buchanan until graduation, but he didn’t go to private school like her, he went to Brainerd High, a few blocks east. He walked to school. He never talked about Laura, or Albert, with his grandparents, or about the childhood he had spent with them. On that day four years earlier, after he’d gotten out of the car and Josephine explained the sleeping arrangements, he had shaken hands with his grandfather, who was standing waiting for them on the porch. “Shake” maybe isn’t quite right, he had held out his hand like an automaton in response to his grandfather’s gesture, and it had moved forward of its own volition, as if drawn by gravitational pull, and Laura Howells was never spoken of again, despite her presence in the room where he would spend most of his time, and the way her absence could be felt in the silence that hung over the house. No one cried. His grandparents went to pick up her personal effects, but they never breathed a word of it to him. If he hadn’t one day stumbled on his mother’s waterlogged passport he would never have known. He grieved her loss in the order and tranquility of a house so firmly planted in the ground, a house with stable walls. Thomas couldn’t fail to respect that.

  He may have hated everything religious in his grandparents’ lives, but the subject was never broached. It wasn’t a bone of contention. Wright and Jo understood instinctively that their daughter had instilled Albert Langlois’s values, the foreign values of a French Catholic atheist who’d repeatedly failed to show the respect they were due, at their own table, by questioning truths plain for all to see. Despite Thomas’s fears on arriving at the house, compounded by Josephine’s prayers in the car, Wright never made Thomas go to church with them, or kneel down to pray at the foot of his bed before going to sleep. When he said grace, Wright closed his eyes, so he wouldn’t see that Thomas hadn’t closed his own and wasn’t saying the blessing along with him or clasping his hands. Wright rarely said anything to Thomas. Josephine talked to him more, but never asked him to pray. She’d done so once and once only.

  At fourteen Thomas had dreamed of being a paleontologist, or maybe some other “ologist” who got to work with fossils or ancient artifacts dug out of the layers of wet mud. He spent hours looking up the etymology of the suffix “ologist”: -logist, logos, logic; he suspected that maybe deep down what he really wanted to be when he grew up was a philologist, but as he went into it further he realized that there was no such thing any more, the term was reserved for those men with powder on their faces who had managed, so many years ago, to convince his father that leap years cancelled birthdays. At eighteen he didn’t have a clearly defined dream, but that didn’t worry him. His marks were good, he was confident he could get into whatever university he wanted, his future was wide open. He liked words as much as numbers, could estimate distances in the blink of an eye, was one of the select group for whom a cosine was more than a strange word to be memorized and forgotten once class was over.

  Nearly everyone thought he was a nice guy, though he often wore a serious, absorbed expression. He was comfortable talking to people of all walks of life, especially adults. When you saw him walking off into the horizon, in the light of the setting sun, that was your feeling: He’ll go far, that one. For a young man abandoned by his father, a kid who lost his mother tragically, he seemed to be doing very well indeed. You figured he wouldn’t let himself be beaten. That he had grown into a fine young man, that he seemed happy. His hair was always clean and neatly combed, he dressed plainly and ate healthily. You never heard anyone say a bad word about him. You could count his friends on one hand, sure, but who really has more than that? He actually had only one true friend, a single person in whose presence he could clearly see his strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures, what the future held for him.

  One thing we need to know about Thomas’s life at that time is that, from Laura’s death until the day he ran off into the mountains, he never lost contact with his mother’s best friend and colleague, Mary. Just weeks after finding out Laura had died, Mary showed up at Thomas’s new school. She was there when the bell rang, leaning against her Volkswagen Cabriolet in the cool afternoon. The heat didn’t work, she warned him. She told him how sad she was, and it came out so blunt and so honest that Thomas started crying with her, in front of the other students leaving the schoolyard and boarding the school bus. She took him in her arms and he felt that this was exactly what he’d been missing since the accident: a hand in his hair; this hand not another. When he was younger, Mary would come over sometimes, so he was intimately familiar with her voice and her laugh, and he liked her a lot because she never took his spot on the couch, had always preferred to hang out in the kitchen. He’d never felt any competition between them, they weren’t fighting for his mother’s affection. Each lived out their relationship with Laura in a different room.

  He got in Mary’s car and she took him out to eat in her neighbourhood, Avondale. They had fried chicken and French fries and he was the only white person in the restaurant. Then they went to her place, where he met her sister Michelle and brother Byron. As they drove toward Mary’s the faces got blacker and blacker, hundreds of faces, each one darker than the last. It was as if the city had been divided into colour-coded zones, precise quadrilaterals: between Cleveland and Walker was reserved for mixed-race folks, while Windsor to Ruby was for those so black they looked African, their Nigerian and Angolan ancestry written on their faces. Mary had introduced him to her sister and brother, and a few teenagers sitting on the front steps braiding their hair or rolling cigarettes, kids whose names he could never keep straight. They went inside. In a room at the back of the house they sat together on the bed and Mary showed him a photo. She insisted on giving him a silver brooch his mother had left there. Thomas tried to refuse. Mary wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  “You should keep it,” he said. “She would have wanted you to keep it, don’t you think?”

  “No. She would have wanted me to give it to you, you to come here so I could give it to you. So I’d have an excuse to bring you here. And we could talk about her. Together.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. Anyway, don’t worry, it’s not like I’m leaving you the most important thing I have of hers.”

  She smiled and the room lit up. Thomas had never looked at anyone that way. She got up one more time, to move toward the back of the room to the dresser with a boom box on it. She pressed a button and then came back to sit down close to him, holding a tape.

  “See, your mom also left me something else, and this one I’m keeping for myself. So we’ll both have our own souvenir of her. This tape has all the songs we used to listen to together, we’d sing them together in the car, or when we were getting ready to go out. There’s all kinds of stuff, The Supremes, The Doors, A Tribe Called Quest, all kinds of stuff. Do you like music?”

  Mary had worked at the library from the beginning, and helped set up programs for the public, storytelling evenings, stuff like that. They were popular. There’d been a time, after Albert left, when she and Laura had grown very close. Thomas liked it a lot when she came by the house. They’d order pizza and the girls would help him with his homework, reciting the answers in affected voices like lines in a play. But his mother had never brought him here.

  As he climbed the stairs of the little one-storey house on Roanoke Avenue, following close on Mary’s heels, he didn’t catch a hint of animosity in the eyes of the boys and girls hanging out on the stoop in the setting sun. He would raise a hand in greeting, and was relieved when it was returned, without ever really understanding why. On the way home in Mary’s Cabriolet he thought of his grandfather and his cheeks grew red.
History wasn’t one of Thomas’s favourite subjects. He was more partial to rocks, mountains, and the winding paths of rivers. But history was sitting heavy on his shoulders at that moment, and he was having a hard time figuring out exactly why. It had something to do with his grandfather’s white hair and the Confederate flags flying in front of certain neighbours’ houses. Something in his grandfather’s unvarnished pride in his white hair, how people talked about the past and history with fire in their eyes, forgetting to swallow their spit. No, history wasn’t his best subject because he was convinced that, unlike geology and rock strata, history’s sole purpose is to erase as it progresses, leaving us free to move on to other things. Flags and borders may disappear, but plateaus and valleys leave traces. He clasped his mother’s brooch tight. Mary drove fast.

  After that first trip to Avondale he had gone to see Mary often, and in the last few years he’d made his own way there. He took the bus and walked the streets alone, even late at night. The neighbourhood kids recognized him, he’d even been nicknamed “Thomas Jefferson” by one of the most outgoing of the bunch, who could be found sitting on the steps or leaning on the metal fence between the yards. Thomas took his time coming up with an answer, and settled on “Frederick Douglass,” though he had no idea what his real name was. The kid just laughed. He got the reference, that’s what mattered. After that, Thomas felt this thing they shared whenever he walked by, a sneaky erudition, something known to them alone. When he came into Mary’s house she’d say, “Hey big man,” though he was only fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen. The door and even the screen door were always wide open, Thomas would go right in, taking care not to step on the rickety threshold, and he’d follow the light to find Mary’s smile in one of the rooms. Sometimes she’d say, “Hey, honey.” She was at least fifteen years older than him.