I Was There the Night He Died

by Ray Robertson

  The clothes are dry so I dump them into the laundry basket. Sara was always cold—the thermostat was never high enough in the winter, it was never hot enough for her in the summer—and it used to piss me off, that I’d be melting in August when she would always ask me before our evening dog walk if it was cold outside, did I think she needed a sweater.

  I’m carrying the basket upstairs when the waft of gentle warmth that is the just-dried clothes nearly knocks me to my knees. If Sara was in the bedroom when I’d return from the basement with the laundry from the dryer, I’d dump the entire steaming basket on her, a hot mud slide of freshly clean clothes. She’d roll around on the bed underneath the warm laundry like Barney would on his back on the couch after a particularly satisfying dinner.

  Before I put the clothes away I go to the front window. That sonofabitch. When is he going to shut that goddamn light off? Doesn’t he know that the night belongs to everyone?

  * * *

  “How about a movie?” Rachel says.

  “They’re all terrible.”

  “You don’t even know what’s playing.”

  “I don’t need to,” I say. “They’re either light romantic comedies or Us versus Them action movies or sub-Tolkien teenage escape-fests, with a token Highbrow Harlequin thrown in to make the dentists’ wives and all of the other local intellectuals feel superior to everyone else in town because they go to see films and not mere movies.”

  “Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No—what?”

  “Let’s rent a DVD then,” Rachel says. “You can pick it out and make sure we don’t watch the wrong thing and damn our souls for eternity.”

  “No thanks. There’s only Blockbuster, and they just offer take-home versions of the same crap as what the theatres serve up.”

  We’ve had dinner, we’ve had sex, we’re sitting side-by-side on the couch in Rachel’s small living room. What I really want to do is go home and pound down a Mountain Dew or two and get properly jittery and get back to work on my book.

  Don’t misunderstand: I’m not disciplined, I just like to write. Sara used to call me the world’s laziest workaholic. Just contemplating cutting the grass or talking to a neighbour about how long the sidewalk construction is taking overwhelms me with actual somatic weariness, a heaviness of head and heart that’s as certain to result as a loss of light is when a cloud passes across the sun. But three or four hours of applying carefully considered black squiggles to an enemy white page has the entirely opposite effect—simultaneously repositions both feet on the earth and pushes my spirit to places it can’t get to when, say, you’re trying to figure out how to hang the new blind in the kitchen.

  “Okay,” Rachel says, standing up and clapping her hands once, loudly. “What if I open a bottle of wine and you help me with the letter I’ve got to get to the government by next week? I should have thought of this before. Who better to argue for CCI’s continuing relevance than one of its most famous alumni?”

  “I’m not famous.”

  “Compared to most everyone else you went to school with you are.”

  “That doesn’t make me famous. That just means I’m not anonymous.”

  We both look at the TV, which is never not on at Rachel’s. Over footage of several red mini-skirted dancing bears performing before thousands of happily applauding children and their circus-going parents, a sombre British voice explains exactly how bears are taught to “dance:” how music is played while the metal floor underneath them is heated enough to burn their feet, compelling them to hop from foot to foot, thereby guaranteeing that when the same music is played again later they instinctively hop about, hoping to avoid the remembered pain.

  “My God, that’s terrible,” Rachel says, sitting back down. “I had no idea.”

  “I’ve got to write this down,” I say, pulling the pen and notepad out of my pocket.

  “Why would you want to write something like that down?”

  “So I won’t forget it.”

  “It’s terrible. It’s worse than terrible.”

  “I know. And it’s a terribly powerful metaphor, too.”

  “A metaphor for what?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll know when I find it. And when I do, I don’t want to forget.”

  Rachel looks back at the TV and I scribble in my notepad. She gets up again, but this time without clapping her hands.

  “Where are you going?” I say.

  “I’m getting my keys. I’m going to drive you home.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “No,” she says, going into the bedroom.

  And I don’t think she is, either.

  * * *

  Finally, some good news. Great news. News so great I wish I had someone to tell it to.

  The couple who came by last week have made an offer on the house—less than what we’re asking for, but more than enough money to make me credit card debt-free again and to lay a nice fat nest egg in Dad’s bank account. I consider calling Rachel—pick up the phone and enter the first three numbers, in fact—but how can I be yakky happy when Samantha is on the other side of the street so obviously sullen sad? I’m not my teenage neighbour’s keeper, but as soon as the house is sold it’ll be time to start thinking about going home. It’s not the same now, it’ll never be the same, but Toronto is home, at least I have a home to go back to. Samantha needs a home. Even if it’s just for four forgettable undergraduate years. A home for now, anyway, a home along the way.

  I know she’ll show up if I do, but what I’ll say once she does I’m a lot less sure of. Half a bottle of red wine later, I’m two for two: here she comes, and what the hell am I supposed to say to her? Whether because of the wine or the news of the offer on the house or because I’m simply tired of waiting for her to make the first confessional move, I hear myself ask, “So why do you see a psychiatrist?”

  “So who died tonight?”

  “You go first.”

  I can hear her slowly rocking on the swing set behind me, the dry grinding creak of the freezing chains every time she sways forward then backward. “I told you. It’s my parents’ idea.”

  “You mean your dad’s?”

  The creaking stops; I hear her flick her lighter once, twice, the third time getting the job done. “Yeah. His.”

  “Where’s your mum in all of this? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “She’s dead in all of this.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t like it when people said they were sorry your wife died?”

  I pull from my bottle of wine. “I guess when the shoe is on the other foot it’s easier to understand what the other person is feeling.”

  “I guess it is.”

  The swing set is creaking again. I take this as my cue to continue. “So it’s just your brother and your dad and you.”

  “The last time I checked.”

  “So why did you say your parents make you see a psychiatrist?”

  She’s either thinking or toking or maybe both. Probably both.

  “Habit, I guess,” she says.

  I know what she means. “I know what you mean.”

  “You do?”

  My head says, Shut up, but my gut argues otherwise, argues that if you want this girl to tell the truth, you’ve got to give her back at least a little bit of the same.

  “My wife Sara and I used to talk about everything. It used to feel like something wasn’t real unless we discussed it. I remember coming home from her funeral and wanting to tell her about it, to go over what happened with her.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “It does?”

  “After my mum died—I was fourteen—I used to get so disappointed that the sandwich in my lunch wasn’t the
peanut butter and banana on twelve grain bread that my mum always made.”

  “Who made your sandwiches after that?”

  “My dad.”

  “You could have asked him to make them.”

  “It wouldn’t have been the same.” She takes a toke; I can almost hear her forcing the pot deep inside her lungs. “I don’t know how she did it, but the way she made them was so good, and every time, too. She had her own way of doing it. Nobody else can make them like my mum did.”

  “Sara used to wake me up if I was having a nightmare.” I can’t believe I just said that. I lift my bottle and see that it’s almost empty and start to believe it a little bit more. “Once, I had a dream she was leaving me for some other guy and I guess I was screaming in my sleep and she woke me up. She was the reason I was screaming and she was the one who stopped me.” I get up from the bench and go and sit on the swing next to Samantha’s and take the joint from between her fingers. “Now when I have a nightmare I have to see it through to the end.”

  “Do you ever … I mean, do you ever have nightmares about what happened? To her, I mean.”

  “Sometimes. Less than I used to.”

  “That’s terrible.” She takes the joint back.

  “It has its advantages, actually. I’m usually really mad when it happens—sometimes at her, most of the time just at the fact it happened—and it lets me be mad, to really let go and rant and rave until I wake myself up.”

  “That’s an advantage?”

  “It means I don’t have to be angry when I’m awake.” This time she doesn’t wait for me to retrieve the joint, hands it to me as soon as she’s done. “You need to be angry—I’ll probably always be angry—but I don’t want to live that way. No one ought to live that way.”

  A woman bundled up in her scarf so tightly and with her toque tugged down so low and encased in a coat so big she almost isn’t there scurries past us, her chihuahua as eager as she is to get where they need to go. I miss walking Barney, miss the easy virtue of doing a dog a favour. If we were in Toronto, the dog would be wearing a coat and boots likely worth as much as its owner’s. Despite this, I miss Toronto too.

  “Back in Oakville,” Samantha says, “some of my friends and I used to have bulimia parties.”

  “That can’t possibly be what it sounds like.”

  “It was totally stupid. I was the only one who ended up going through with it. Everyone talked so big about how we were all going to drink lots of water and we were all going to do it—no backing out—but when it came time to start, I was the only one to even go into the bathroom. And when I came back out everyone was looking at me like I was some kind of freak. What total wanksters.” She tugs the hood of her sweatshirt forward on each side, flicks the roach onto the snow and sticks her bare hands into the pockets of her coat.

  “That’s one way of looking at it, I guess,” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, maybe deciding not to force yourself to throw up isn’t the worse decision a person can make.”

  “You don’t get it. We made a pact. It was supposed to be a promise between friends. You know, BFF, all that crap.”

  “Maybe with friends like that … ”

  She grabs her phone from the pouch of her hoodie and makes herself invisible with her thumbs. I don’t know who she could be texting, she’s never mentioned any friends or a boyfriend, but I don’t want to lose her to technology. I’ll give her what she wants, but I’ll give it to her my way, the life of a poet with a guitar, but with a message from me delivered directly to her.

  “Townes Van Zandt died tonight,” I say.

  Samantha looks up from her phone. It’s a start.

  “Townes Van Zandt was a beautiful human being from the years 1968, the year of his first album, until 1978, the year of his last really good one. A mostly absentee father and quite often a nasty drunk and a dispenser of sweet and sour love depending on which way the wind blew, when he played his guitar and sang his songs, though, he was beautiful, he was perfect.”

  “Sounds like someone has got a pretty bad man crush.”

  Cynicism is preferable to sulking, so I keep going.

  “He was like everybody—had advantages like being born rich, and disadvantages like being born rich and suffering from depression and undergoing electroshock therapy that left him with virtually no memory of the first ten years of life. But the thing, the main thing, is that your life and my life might be different from his, but it’s still the same high, low, and in between, the same as it is for everyone all of the time everywhere.”

  I lift the wine bottle, but it’s got nothing left to give. I’m on my own.

  “The music he made came from what Texas does best, glopping together all of the good stuff from folk and country and blues and with a generous peppery dash of good old, old America weirdness. I said once in a book I wrote that when so-and-so sang, he made a broken heart seem like an attractive option. I say it again now.”

  “Okay,” Samantha says. “But where’s the but?”

  “What but?”

  “There’s always a but to your stories.”

  “That’s what makes them real.”

  “Because they really happened, you mean.”

  “No, because they’re really real.”

  Samantha replaces her phone with her bag of weed, and I allow her a moment to roll another number. She takes the time to look at the snow that’s started to fall instead. I look at it too.

  “But he hurt himself. With booze, mostly, although it’s not just what you put inside yourself that can hurt you. And for someone who believed that a good song was rarer and more important than anything else in the world, worst of all was that he ended up hurting his music, went from being a deft finger-picker with hands like delicate spiders to a lackluster strummer, and his voice, which was once fragile but forceful, became whispery and croaky weak. I know that the songs he wrote and the shows he played during those ten teeming years are better and will last longer than anything I’ll ever do, and what right have I got to toss pebbles at the sun, but it’s sad to watch beautiful things turn ugly, is all. It’s just really sad.”

  It’s still snowing. It looks like it might snow all night.

  * * *

  “Sam, I strongly suggest you reconsider your decision.”

  “Like I said, I just think we can do better.”

  “And like I said, this is a very weak market right now, and I’m personally very comfortable with their counter offer.”

  “That’s less than what we wanted.”

  “By only ten thousand.”

  “Laura, I’m selling this house to help my father. It wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t get him everything I can.”

  “Well, as it stands right now, you’re not going to be getting him anything.”

  I put the phone to my other ear.

  “Look, Laura, I respect your professional opinion and I appreciate all the hard work you’ve put into this, but I’m going to have to say no, that’s my final answer. Let’s just keep showing the house and I’m sure we’ll get our asking price soon enough.”

  “Keep showing the house? Sam, only one prospective buyer has come to see it. And they’re the ones who made the offer.”

  “And I’m sure there’ll be others.”

  The phone is silent. I switch it back to my other ear.

  “If it’s relevant to the sale of the house, do you mind if I ask you a personal question, Sam?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Does this have anything to do with Rachel?”

  “No. Why would it have anything to do with Rachel?”

  “Well, I know you two have been seeing a fair bit of each other socially, and I wonder if maybe you might be delaying the sale of your parents’ house so you’ll have a reason to stay around Chatham a little lon
ger.”

  “Laura, I can honestly say I haven’t given Rachel a single thought through any of this.”

  “Okay, but if—”

  “Honestly, I haven’t considered her at all.”

  “Okay.”

  After I hang up, it occurs to me that I don’t want to sound as indifferent to Rachel as I did, that I don’t like how cold I came across. I hear the postman on the step and open the door in time for him to hand me my most recent eBay purchase, a pizza box-sized brown package with three new records inside, including a white label promotional copy of Gene Clark’s Two Sides to Every Story. I can’t wait to show it to Samantha. I’m sure she’s never seen anything like it.

  Chapter Eleven

  I’ve made my first minimum payment toward my Visa bill. Sara and I had a policy that plastic was strictly for emergency purchases. This month’s minimum payment alone is almost as large as any total balance that we’d ever incurred. I hate to give money away to a credit card company, but I don’t have any choice. All Laura needs to know is that I’m not accepting the offer we received because I’m holding out for a better one, but the real reason I’m in debt is because Samantha needs to hear who died, Samantha needs to hear the stories I’ve got to tell.

  Stories that I’m uncomfortably way ahead of schedule in writing, incidentally. I didn’t intend to be this far along in finishing Lives of the Poets (with Guitars), it just happened. In a way, it’s Samantha’s fault that I’m almost done with what I don’t want to be done with. I’d planned to stretch this project out until I was ready to write my next novel, a book that somehow has to incorporate Sara’s death. It doesn’t have to be about her, she doesn’t even have to appear in it, but what happened to her and what it means to me has to find its way into words. You can choose where your book is set and who’s in it and what they do and don’t do, but you can’t control what your book is about. My next novel could chronicle the uproarious cross-country adventures of Canada’s reigning one-armed lawn bowling champion and his trusty monkey butler sidekick, but its guts would be about what it means to love someone and to lose someone and to have to go on living anyway. Problem is, once those guts get transplanted onto the page, that’s where they’ll do the majority of their living.