by K. D. Miller
She will not reopen the 1963 diary. Having sampled that year of her daughter’s life, she will move on. Yes. Just a taste of each volume, then—
She drops the diary into a plastic bag and carries it down the hall to the garbage room, clutching the wooden rail jutting from the wall. She consults the posted chart as to how to dispose of books. Recycle. She pushes the appropriate button. Opens the chute. Closes it again.
All the way back down the hall, as she half drags herself along, still clutching the bag with the diary in it, she berates herself. You’ve buried a daughter and left a husband. Surely you can do this.
Apparently not.
July 10, 1968
Up at Lost Lake for three weeks. Stuck here without a piano, just when the Rachmaninoff is—literally—within reach. My hands are opening. They will manage to span those chords. But only if I practice, practice, practice. Not if I rest, as Mummy keeps insisting I do, or if I seek balance, as Daddy goes on about. What does achievement, or yes, I will say it—genius—have to do with rest and balance?
For some time now, I’ve had the feeling they’re both jealous of me for being poised on the brink of such a brilliant future. Just one more year of high school. Then McGill. Then Juilliard. I will insist on McGill. I will not go to Carleton on the bus every day and come home every night like a good girl. It’s bad enough not being allowed to go straight to New York. Having to waste four years getting a BA here first. I am old enough, damn it. No matter what Daddy says.
Even so, there’s going to be a battle royal when I apply for McGill. It has already begun, in fact. Last April, on my seventeenth, when I came in from school, Mummy and Daddy were both waiting for me. Nothing suspicious about that. Daddy always comes home early from the church on my birthday. But then Mummy said, “Morgan, would you come with us into the music room?” And there it was. A Steinway Grand. Just dwarfing the place. I actually cried. I still can’t forgive myself for that. Felt like such a dork. Then, after I had thanked and hugged them to death, I sat them down together on the loveseat while I played the Rachmaninoff. Not perfectly. A few of the chords were still out of reach. Still, the tears seemed to have opened something in me, so my playing was bigger and more passionate than it had ever been.
But then, when I had finished and spun around on the stool to face them, I saw—What? I swear, I had the feeling that I had hurt them. My playing had hurt them. Somehow. I don’t know. They looked older. And smaller. And scared.
I think they’re afraid of their own future. They see me poised to take flight, while they’re stuck. They’ve been burrowing through their lives, deeper and deeper, in one direction. And now they realize they should have been going another way, but—
Is that why they’re trying to keep me on the ground? I will not burrow. I will fly.
First the Steinway Grand. And now the way they’re renovating the rec room—putting in a bathroom and a kitchenette. Even a private entrance out the back. They call it my apartment and claim it’s to give me more independence. But I know a dungeon when I see one.
Meanwhile, I’m stuck at Lost Lake for three weeks. Though if I’m honest, I will admit that I love the place. The big old summer house that’s come down through Mummy’s family. Everything kind of creaky and stained with age. The old-fashioned kitchen. The pond out back. The lake, with its view of the bluffs. I would never admit this to anyone, but sometimes it all makes me wish I could forget about the piano for a while, and just be.
I came close yesterday, when I went out on my bike. I was pedalling along the path beside the meadow. All at once a crow was flying right beside me. He was following me. Or racing me. Anyway, we were together. Communing with each other.
I did a foolish thing. But it felt so necessary. For the longest time, until it flew up and away into a tree, I took my eyes off the path and fixed them on the crow. I did not look where I was going. I trusted the crow to guide me. I gave myself to the crow. I put my life in the crow’s keeping.
Clarissa closes the 1968 diary. Doesn’t even think about bagging it for the chute in the garbage room. No, whatever this needing and seeking are about, it is not about getting rid of things. This is the sixth volume she has dipped into. That phrase of Morgan’s—in the crow’s keeping—became the title of her third book. Her favourite, for all it proved to be the least successful.
Just now, when the 1968 volume fell open in her hands to that particular entry, her courage almost failed her. She wanted to close the diary and try again for an easier passage. But no. This one, which the first time through caused her to throw her head back and howl, would be the one she would reread now.
Hubris. Oh, yes. The three of them. Morgan with the forgivable hubris of youth. At that age, one must believe that everything is within one’s reach, and despise the old for losing faith. Herself and Ramsay too, with their ridiculous conviction that they could contain their child and keep her safe. The irony is that they did manage to persuade Morgan to stay home and go to Carleton instead of McGill. After all, they coaxed, she would likely be off to New York soon enough, wouldn’t she? To try out her wings?
In the crow’s keeping.
Morgan was so very much alive. Did that make her death harder for her? At the time, Clarissa and Ramsay were assured that the crushing of her windpipe would likely have killed their daughter almost instantly. Though she tried to believe that, Clarissa had enough grasp of biology to know better. The body, the mind—it is just too intricate a machine to turn off in a second, like a lightbulb when a switch is flipped. And even a lightbulb has its afterglow.
She can only hope that Morgan lost consciousness immediately. Or if not, that she had one of those light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel visions of an apparent afterlife that Ramsay threw himself into researching. A few years after Morgan was gone, he began interviewing people who had had near-death experiences. He drew some highly unscientific conclusions about the phenomenon and published them in a book that became a pop-science hit.
He had left the priesthood by then, and managed to work his crisis of faith into every interview the book garnered. It all added up to a CBC educational TV show in the 1980s called What If. As host, Ramsay welcomed experts on ESP, UFOs, crop circles, ghosts, and other paranormal phenomena. He began each show by asking his guest, “Do you have a question for me today?” The guest would respond—liturgically, Clarissa could not help thinking—“Yes, Ramsay, I do. What if the pyramids were in fact built by visiting extraterrestrials?” Ramsay’s job was to play devil’s advocate, voicing the doubts that would be going through a viewer’s mind. But he did it with a twinkle, making it clear to his guest and the audience that he at least wanted to believe in whatever popular theory was being paraded that week.
Clarissa used to occasionally turn the show on. She and Ramsay were chatting by then during their annual graveside vigils, and he seemed to want her approval of his new career. Once, he confided to her that he only felt truly alive when the TV make-up was itching his neck and the studio lights warming his forehead.
Poor Ramsay. Though his show purported to probe mysterious depths, it was in fact such shallow junk. Early in their marriage, she concluded that what had drawn Ramsay to the priesthood were the splendid robes and the opportunity to chant ancient verses and elevate the host for all to see. His professional persona—benign, urbane—rested as lightly on him as his stole. If anyone ever came to him with a real problem, he was able to muster sixty minutes of apparent compassion, some sensible enough advice, and an appropriate prayer.
She never told him any of that, not even when she was trying to explain why she was leaving him. The truth was that she still loved Ramsay, but could no longer pretend to be part of the one flesh they had been deemed on their wedding day. Besides, she was willing to admit she might be wrong about his vocation. Who was she to say why anyone did anything?
Nor was it easy for him to leave the church. At first, Morgan’s murder
made him pull his priestly robes more tightly round himself. He recounted, in the introduction to his book about near-death experiences, how he actually approached his bishop for permission to conduct her funeral. (I baptised her. In time, I would have performed her wedding.) The bishop (wisely, I now concede) managed to dissuade him.
Clarissa concluded privately that Ramsay left the priesthood because it was threatening to get real. To reveal itself as a real something, or a real nothing. Either way, he did not want to be there for the revelation. He found his niche in television. Once more, he was being watched and admired. Once more, after sixty minutes, he could leave it all behind.
Why on earth had she married him? They were such opposites. Unlike Ramsay, Clarissa resented the spotlight that publication trained on her. She loved writing her books, delighted in the research that preceded writing them, would all but live at the library, seeking out references to her subject—ravens, for instance—in works of literature, philosophy, folklore, the Bible and other mythologies. First and foremost, though, she would ground her work in provable facts gleaned from experts—marine biologists, arachnologists, ornithologists. Her books, for all their scholarly discipline, were engaging and layman-friendly. With the exception of In the Crow’s Keeping, they sold better than books of natural science generally did. That alone would have been enough for her—just knowing that people were buying or borrowing her works and reading them with silent pleasure. But publication brought with it a degree of attention she could hardly stand. What are you all doing here? she would wonder at a group of people assembled to hear her read. And afterwards, as they lined up to get her autograph, she would want to say, Oh, for God’s sake. It’s just a scribble. I could be anyone.
She is not sure why her book about crows fell flat. Perhaps the topic lacked what the critics called the ick-factor, which had buoyed her other works. People might not like crows, with their drab plumage and squawking cry, but they didn’t shudder at the thought of them. Or maybe the book simply appeared too soon after the one about bats, which did take off.
Echo Life came out in the early 1990s, concurrent with a glut of vampire novels and movies. For a short time Clarissa became the focus of radio interviewers and TV talk show hosts who wanted to add a pinch of science to their programs. Once, under hot studio lights, she found herself seated beside a vampirologist. Such people were actually being invited by accredited universities to teach courses in what they called their discipline. This one, in full gothic costume and makeup, argued vehemently for the existence of human vampires, then went on to plump for their rights as a marginalized community.
When it was Clarissa’s turn to talk, she began by saying she did not know what she was doing there. Only three out of dozens of species of bat in fact sucked blood for a living. The rest ate fruit and insects and so on—not unlike birds. As for the existence of the likes of Dracula, well, did her esteemed colleague also believe in Sasquatch and Nessie and the Windigo? If not, why not? Did these creatures not also deserve our respect and support? Perhaps, even, the right to vote?
Her next book, about ravens, crows, and other corvids, did not do well. For a few years before she got started on Octopus Heart, Clarissa was at loose ends. She read Morgan’s diaries for the second time. And she would sometimes indulge an odd fantasy of sneaking onto Ramsay’s TV show. Just imagine the look on his face as the spotlight hit the interviewee’s chair and—it was her! Unexpected. Unscripted. His ex-wife. The mother of his dead child.
She would follow the format. Even if Ramsay sat there in shock, failing to introduce her or to ask the ritual, “Do you have a question for me today?” she would still say to him, “What if Morgan had not been killed?”
Impossible, of course. There was no way that she could pull it off. CBC’s security was tight, and she knew no one on the inside who would risk their job to get her into that spotlit chair. Impossible morally, too. Indefensibly cruel thing to do to Ramsay. So why did she keep imagining it? What was she hoping to accomplish? What would it get her?
Focus, perhaps? The way he paid attention to his What If guests, never looking away from them, barely blinking. And the sense of intimacy he achieved, as if the two of them were making love instead of speculating that what we think of as ghosts might actually be evidence that time is not linear, that the past and future are instead concurrent with the present. She never got even the appearance of such interest from him.
She went straight from her girlhood bed to Ramsay’s. He punctured her on their wedding night. That’s how it felt—push, push, then stab. It made her think of the word compunction. Once she was home from her honeymoon, she looked the word up. To prick severely was the first definition. Remorse for wrongdoing was the second. It was her first inkling that her marriage might have been a mistake.
But something good did come of it all. Morgan. That’s what she told herself through the dry years, the years of silent contempt. We had Morgan together.
Clarissa remembers sitting beside her virtually estranged husband on the loveseat in the music room that day in 1968, listening to Morgan play the Rachmaninoff for them on her new Steinway grand. Though of course, Morgan was not playing for them. Morgan never played for anyone but herself.
What the girl would have seen on her mother’s face that day when she finished the piece and spun round on the piano stool was indeed fear. Clarissa had just realized how close she was to extinction. Her husband had not touched her in years. His affairs were discreet enough. He would never do anything that might impede his chosen path to the bishopric. But she knew the other women existed, perhaps even glancing her way on Sunday mornings with eyes full of smug pity. She still wore a hat to church, for God’s sake. When she looked around, the only other hatted women were the elderly widows.
She knew, that day, as she listened to her daughter play, that she was dwindling. Less and less noticed. In time, transparent. In a little more time, not there at all.
Once she has finished with the 1968 diary, Clarissa goes out to buy meat. She cannot transport a full load of groceries home all at once, not even with the aid of her walker, so she compartmentalizes. Monday, enough meat, fish, and cheese for the week. Wednesday, fruit and vegetables. Friday, bread, cereal, crackers, and so on. Though she eats less, she is still blessed with appetite and the ability to cook for herself. Her horror of assisted living has largely to do with the very thing the pamphlets play up—our well-appointed dining room and varied cuisine. She especially likes to grill a bit of chicken or beef for her supper. She is contemptuous of vegetarians, considers them elitist. A good part of the world’s population would sell its soul for a scrap of meat to eat. She also considers them morally naïve, the way they go on about the cruelty of slaughterhouses. Have they no grasp of the immense, pervasive cruelty of nature, the way a raptor lifts a shrieking baby rabbit into the air, for example, then feeds it, still living, to its young? Has it never occurred to them that they are not in fact at the top of the food chain, but somewhere in the middle? That all kinds of creatures would happily have their attached and quivering entrails for lunch?
Clarissa stops for breath half way to the grocery store. She sets the handbrakes on her walker, pulls down the seat, and sits. As she looks around, she spots yet another change in the neighbourhood. What for decades was the Melville Staines Funeral Home is now something called Valé. She stands up, gets her walker rolling, and approaches the front entrance. After reading the brief description on the plaque beside the door, she turns the knob and goes in.
The place smells of eucalyptus. The walls are done in pale shades of ochre and sage, and there is music of a sort playing—an all but tuneless humming. A woman of about forty rises from a chair behind a desk. “Hello,” she says. “I’m Felicity Staines. May I ask what brings you to Valé?”
“Nosiness.” Clarissa leans on her walker, declining the offer of a chair. “This place used to be a funeral parlour. What happened?”
&n
bsp; “We still do offer funeral services,” Felicity Staines says. Her voice is pitched to such a soothing tone that Clarissa can barely hear it. Her hair is uniformly gray, pulled back smoothly into a chignon. She wears a cream-coloured robe that reaches the floor. “However, in our new incarnation as Valé, we have begun to move forward, heeding the wisdom of recent legislation and anticipating our clients’ additional future needs.”
It takes Clarissa a minute. “Are you talking about assisted suicide? Isn’t that already on the books?”
“It is and it isn’t, Ms …?”
“Pettingill. Mrs.”
“Mrs. Pettingill. The present situation is legally very restrictive and, we believe, depressingly clinical. The peaceful, painless, even joyful culmination we plan to offer our clients, entirely on their terms and only when the time is right for them, remains a vision. However, we are compiling a waiting list, and it is our hope that, as legislation evolves—”
“Why the accent?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Why the acute accent on the e of Valé? Doesn’t anybody actually get that it’s Latin for farewell? Or do they think it’s about the valley of the shadow? Or departing this vale of tears, maybe? Sorry. I’m a writer. Words interest me.”
Felicity Staines smiles. “May I give you some literature to take away, Mrs. Pettingill? I would love to talk to you about our mission. Unfortunately, I have a funeral to oversee in just a few minutes. Please feel free to call or drop in at any time.”
Once home with her meat, Clarissa has a read of the folder she took away from Valé. It begins by complimenting her for doing just that—for having the wisdom to look ahead and realize that the independent and active life she enjoys now may well become significantly less so, with the passage of time. It goes on to drop little verbal bombs—Disabled. Disoriented. Dependent. Burden. (“You left out incontinent,” Clarissa mutters at this point.) Ah, but there is a way to avoid all that unpleasantness. And that is where Valé comes in.