Despite all that had happened, and certain recurring nightmares, he continued to believe that September 11, and its impact on his thoughts and the questions he had around his identity, was little more than a dark episode in a new life he was living, enjoying, with what resembled a long-term plan for the first time, amid this vague pervasive threat. He’d started his second year of university and was living in the student residence, a collection of greyish buildings next to the Metro station. Days went by, each one much like the next. But he was happy. He had friends in different neighbourhoods and was discovering the city’s distant, secret corners. When he had free time he’d go for a walk, it gave him time to think. He’d take the major thoroughfares, and head down the Main and along the Lachine Canal into Saint-Henri where, according to Albert, the whole story had begun. He liked to turn around and, with a view of the oratory in the distance, note that he had passed underneath the mountain in tunnels. The campus was enormous. He went to football games and swim meets. Unlike Chattanooga, Montreal felt like living in a big city. It was dirty but resilient, overflowing with echoes and cranes, a city where the sounds never stopped.
At the university library he could access the Internet on shared workstations. He’d check his email during his long breaks between morning and afternoon classes. November was here. It had snowed the night before, but the snowflakes vanished the second they hit the ground.
He talked to his father often, in both English and French. Their relationship wasn’t tied to any one language, they’d just find the right words for whatever they had to say at the moment, whatever they were thinking. They weren’t afraid of words. Albert had come to visit his miniscule apartment a few times. He said it reminded him of the cadets’ barracks, back in the day, something about the strict discipline of the concrete, straight walls firmly cemented into the ground. When he turned up in Chattanooga, Albert had been carrying his old cadet duffle bag, and Laura thought he might be a soldier. But no soldier would show his face in public with a beard like that. Albert visited his son’s residence, in that big city he’d never lived in himself, and said something he’d never said before: he was proud of Thomas. He was proud to be there, proud of the way things were going, where they seemed to be headed. When they talked on the phone he made jokes in English and French and Thomas picked up the undertones, double-entendres, puns. They talked about Aimé often, as if he were a fictional character they’d invented for kicks and given a backstory, invented a life and enough features to make him real, but not enough to complicate things. Thomas wasn’t scared Albert would fall back into his old obsessive ways. He had successfully detoxed and was living in the here and now, he said with a laugh; he was through with the past. He looked after his land, cut trees all year long, bucked logs to sit on or for firewood. Thomas had the notebook and kept it like a token of past tribulations, something salvaged from a great shipwreck.
There is another thing we must not leave out of our account, something that made Thomas’s heart swell and ate away at it at the same time. For months, since he’d received the first of a series of letters on February 28, he’d been corresponding with Mary. Now it was early November. He hadn’t received any word since the attacks, and he was worried.
It was in his thoughts, burning on his mind. It had happened quite naturally, after two years of silence, without either of them knowing quite what to expect. In blue ink on coloured paper, in flowing handwriting with long syllables, she’d wished him a happy birthday. This year he would turn twenty-one, and officially become an adult in her country. It didn’t make her feel any younger to think about that, she wrote, but at the same time, when she did, she didn’t exactly feel old either. The letter was short and Thomas replied right away. A few words, quickly scribbled; deeply felt thanks, and a promise to write a longer letter soon to tell her all about the intervening years.
They’d been corresponding for months and, while neither had specifically brought up the idea of leaving, or of coming back, the possibility was hanging there between the lines. Thomas talked about his studies, how much he loved going to class. He’d always been a good student, disciplined and focused. Mary had the handwriting of a librarian, someone used to filling out catalogue cards. Her words were unadorned but clear, gently sloped. Somewhere in the middle of the continent their letters met, wherever it was that letters crossed borders, and the subtle perfume that Mary sprayed on her letters filled up the trucks and mailboxes. She wrote that she had never felt that way. Never, she wrote again, underlined with a single unwavering line. Sometimes Thomas had to stop reading to take a moment to think. To look out the little window and catch his breath, though no one had exactly taken it away from him. A few seconds later, he would plunge back into the world Mary had made for him alone.
They shared secrets. That night, just before the accident, the night they’d spent at her house, he had barely slept. Did she know that? He’d spent hours staring at the white label of her tank top in the dark, a tiny white point sticking out against her skin. Did she know that? He pictured Mary in her Avondale bungalow, stooped over her desk, braids hanging down and a cup of tea at her side. He asked whether Frederick Douglass and his friends still hung out in front of her house like little sentries. She answered that there were more and more people standing guard as the neighbourhood grew more and more violent. He didn’t dare ask for news about Keysha-Ann, but Mary gave it to him anyway. She knew him better than anyone else, after all.
As he read the sentence, Thomas felt love, and understood perfectly well what it was, this thing that held him tightly in its grip and also set him free. He hadn’t put it into words right away, but over months, the words grew increasingly clear. He could feel himself growing older, all these experiences pushed back first of all by Laura’s death and then by his warm, almost stifling welcome at Wright and Jo’s, it was all happening at once. In June 2001 he wrote Mary to wish her a happy birthday, she’d just turned thirty-eight.
He was in love with her, and she was with him. But several weeks had passed without a letter.
On his way out he finally found a letter in the numbered cubby he’d been assigned, a little metal cube in the west wall of the hallway. It was the first he’d received since the attacks in New York and Washington, the first in far too long. He snatched the envelope. There was no one around. The scent was faint but still there, definitely. He sat down in one of the armchairs and cut the envelope flap with his pocketknife, a present from Albert that he always carried on his person.
When he’d told his father about the party and the people up on the roof, about their comments and their laughter, their out-of-control euphoria, Albert told him to pay no mind. Those people didn’t understand a thing. And Thomas had wanted to believe him, to trust him, even if part of him understood their reaction, or at least couldn’t find it in himself to blame them wholeheartedly. That part of him was there, right there, always at the surface, just waiting to take a breath of air before diving back down. A few months before, when he’d talked to his father about Mary, during his summer vacation in Sainte-Anne, he’d looked him in the eyes and said that that was great news, he’d always liked Mary a lot. The two of them wouldn’t be there together if it weren’t for her. And Thomas wanted to believe it, even if Keysha-Ann’s features kept working their way into his mind, behind his closed eyes.
He took the letter out of the envelope. Looked it over first, noting the paper, the colour of the words, the straight lines and margins. In this letter Mary asked him to forgive her for how long it had taken her to write. She had received his letter, and thanked him for it. She then explained, at length, how the September 11 attacks had affected her personally in a multitude of different ways. She’d needed time to think, to step away and catch the breath that had been sucked right out of her. She told Thomas that her uncle, her mother’s brother, had been killed in the Pentagon attack, he’d been in the wing of the building the plane crashed into. The family was devastated. Mary had go
ne to Washington for the funeral, it was family only, the way they wanted it. She’d seen a lot of relatives out there. People she had no memory of had hugged her and cried in her arms. For years Mary’s mother had been her one connection to these people. Now Louis’s death had brought them together.
He had been killed instantly, Mary wrote, he hadn’t suffered as so many others had. Some people were saying that the building had been hit by a missile, not a plane. People were talking all kinds of nonsense. After three or four weeks of respectful silence people were running their mouths again, saying all kinds of things, questioning what they were reading in the papers and seeing on TV. In Chattanooga and all over Tennessee people had theories — about the war, about high finance, about the Jews — it was getting hard to take, Mary explained. Was it different up there in Canada? It seemed like there was no violence at all up there. People respected their neighbours, people lived in harmony, guns were illegal, everyone had insurance, everyone got free healthcare. Down here paranoia was spreading. At the library she’d been asked, for the first time, to report “suspicious loans.” Could Thomas imagine that? Of course, there was no formal requirement, but she’d been “strongly encouraged” to make note on a special form when people borrowed books about the Arab world, Islam, the history of terror, etc. For the first time in her career as a librarian, orders had come down from on high about something other than encouraging the love of books and reading and culture and history. She was shaking as she wrote these words, quaking with anger and fear, it showed through in her handwriting, Thomas could tell. Her words wore more sharply etched, less inclined, less generously spaced.
In her letter she said it was getting impossible to live out here, people were scared, and disoriented, and so was she. She laid it all out: She was scared her country would go up in flames, war on all fronts would be declared, bombs would start raining down. On the one hand you had Arabs killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with any of it, and on the other you had the president declaring war on Muslim countries, it didn’t really matter which, and borders closing up, maybe even the return of the draft. That day, Thomas, had changed everything. Oh, Thomas, it was the worst day of my life. September 11 had changed everything in her life, she couldn’t live there anymore, there was too much she still wanted to accomplish before succumbing to bitterness and fear. There must be libraries in Canada, in Quebec.
At the end of her letter she told him she was coming. If she was welcome she would come. He could hear her voice. She’d written it again, she couldn’t live here anymore, she couldn’t live without him anymore, she was confused but she’d made up her mind, she’d never been so sure of herself, I could learn French, I’m not too old to start. At the airport, a few days later, Thomas took her in his arms.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
MAY 2014
QUEBEC CITY, QC—SAINTE-ANNE-DES-MONTS, QC
It was still chilly, the spring weather had been slow to settle in the city and on the Plains of Abraham, when Thomas went to see his ailing father. The heat was coming in short bursts, in waves like warm currents in a river, gone the moment you felt them. It was mid-May, still below freezing at night, and even the most eager buds weren’t in bloom yet. Albert was going to die amid the shreds and patches of a winter that seemed intent on outstaying its welcome.
Thomas and Mary took their car and drove along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, a road they’d taken dozens of times in recent years. They caught the Saint-Siméon ferry, then took the Gaspésie highway, a long and winding road exposed to the breezes and winds of a spectacular river growing wider and turning into sea before their eyes. A point came where they could no longer see the other bank, and focused on the vistas in front of them. She almost always drove. Thomas, who was so good at everything, had never really learned. Even when she was tired she never made him take his turn. He was a careful navigator, that was enough. When he wasn’t there she got lost, though she’d done the drive hundreds of times, thousands of times, there was a fork in the road at Cap-Chat she missed every time. The car was humming along on new tires. They didn’t talk much. Mary listened to music on the radio, Thomas stared out the window at the landscape, the trees were almost bare. He thought he glimpsed a deer. It might just have been branches swaying in the wind.
The news had come a few weeks earlier. He got a call from Mary on the way from his lab on Dorchester in the lower town to his house in the upper town, not far from the Badelard stairway. He’d just unbuttoned his collar, to breathe more freely, and was walking fast, the day was cold and grey, and his telephone rang. She said that Albert had just called, the results were in. He had the same blood cancer that had killed his sister in the 1980s. He’d been diagnosed. Yes, of course he was going to die, he’d known it for a long time, deep down. They’d been trying to get him to see a doctor for months, but Albert hadn’t set foot in a hospital in over thirty years, not since Thomas was born in fact. Mary told Thomas she was waiting, they’d get ready to go see him, she was sorry. She told him he should call his father as soon as he could, he’d like that.
Albert was going to die, and Thomas ran up the stairs, in his clean shoes and his raincoat, briefcase swinging in his arms. Their house was a little higher up, on Richelieu, he’d be there in a minute.
Mary was waiting for him at the door. They hugged, she lay her hand on the back of his neck, and his hands stroked her spine, and she cried because Albert had finally confirmed what they both knew. It was sad, she was sad for Thomas and for Albert, but his death was bringing something to a close. Thomas held her tight and leaned on her. They remained in a tight embrace for a long time, in the doorway, at the top of the covered outside steps, at once inside and outside this house that belonged to them, in a neighbourhood so different from the one Mary grew up in, so old and lopsided and colourful. They went in and Thomas immediately phoned Albert to tell him that he knew, and to pin down certain details about their arrival.
“I can’t leave until the lab tests are finished, they won’t let me.”
“I know, I understand. I wouldn’t want you to leave everything hanging. Come when you can. Maybe I won’t die. You never know. With the treatments and stuff. There’s new treatments.”
“Did they tell you there’s a chance?”
“No. No chance.”
“What did they say?”
“Six months, tops. That’s the best case.”
And Thomas started counting the number of days in those six months, without actually doing the math, while Albert tried to be funny, saying as he always did that it was high time he bought a big bed for the guest room, after all these years, so he and Mary could finally sleep together in the same bed, under his roof, at least once before he died. Six months was one hundred and eighty-two days. Thomas told Albert he’d do his best to get time off as soon as the preliminary results were in, in two weeks, three at the most. His team would get by without him, his colleagues could handle the analysis. He and Mary would leave right after that.
“You gonna drive?”
“Probably not.”
He could see his dad’s teasing smile.
When they got there Albert had done it: he’d ordered a big double bed to replace the two singles in his childhood bedroom where Thomas and Mary always stayed. They felt at home at Albert’s. For years the three had formed what they called a family. Mary made the best campfires, she’d been a Scout far longer than Albert had been a cadet. She knew tricks to get it going, and quickly took over. She also chopped the best firewood.
Mary and Albert got along well. They had Laura’s memory in common, a thing they shared between them, and Mary had decided to stop fighting for a bigger share. It was time to turn the page, there was no other way. She’d told Thomas, on their first trip to the Gaspé Peninsula, at the start of their relationship: You know your father has a lot of things to be forgiven for. And she made herself available, ready to listen and a
ccept his version, and Albert took the next two days to give her just that. He didn’t try to charm or convince her, just meet her halfway on a specific patch of neutral ground where they might live together.
No one, least of all us, could hope to know how their lives would have unfolded if Laura hadn’t died in that plane crash back in 1994. But there was no point living in that other world, where Laura lived happily ever after, and Albert had done nothing wrong, and Thomas never got to know his grandparents, and he and Mary never met. There was no point, they all agreed. Mary tended the fire, it was something she loved doing, and she and Albert talked about her new job, how easily she learned new languages, the process to become a Canadian citizen. Thomas never thought he’d be able to say it one day, but he felt very close to his father. The thought of it still astonished him sometimes.
That night, for the first time ever at Albert’s house, he and Mary slept together under the same sheets and the same blanket. Albert had gone to bed early. He walked slowly now and had lost a lot of weight. Thomas had helped him up the steps, his arm around his father’s shoulders. They went to sleep knowing full well that it wouldn’t be long now. At dinner Albert had tried to make it sound less serious than it was. It wasn’t like it used to be, when his sister Monique died. Cancer had taken both his parents as well. But he thought he might make it. Did he really believe it? You couldn’t tell by looking at him in the cold, bright daylight.
He said no to chemotherapy and the doctors prescribed drugs, an end-of-life cocktail of painkillers. He was going to die at home with his son and his daughter-in-law. It was his choice. He wasn’t old, barely fifty-five, people lived to a hundred these days, a hundred and ten, even. People pulled through infections and contagious diseases and cancers of the brain. He wasn’t old but his body was no longer responding, the blood vessels were compromised, the red blood cells and white blood cells and platelets were all out of order. His skin had changed colour. It was somewhere between grey and yellow.
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