by Terry Fallis
My BlackBerry chirped as we stepped out of the funeral home. I had a look at the screen and saw that it was Amanda calling. I raised my index finger to Lauren and stepped away to take it.
“Hi, Amanda.”
“Hi, David. I’m so sorry about your mother. Are you okay?”
“Thank you. We’re hanging in there. It wasn’t unexpected. We just didn’t know when. In the end, it happened quite quickly, which was probably not a bad thing.”
“My mother died two years ago and I’m not over it yet,” Amanda confessed. “I’m not sure I ever will be. I think it’s why I’m such a bitch sometimes.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. And you are not a bitch,” I assured her, adding “very often” inside my head.
“Well, I was a bitch yesterday. Sorry about that. Even though you should have brought us into it earlier, you made a pretty strong case for Grandma Percival. But I still don’t think it will fly.”
“Neither do I,” I sighed.
“Well, I won’t keep you. I know you have other more important matters on your mind,” she said. “I just wanted to let you know I was thinking of you. We’ll hold the fort till you get back. Don’t give all this stuff at the office a second thought. What you’re doing is the really important part of our lives.”
“Thanks, Amanda. I appreciate it. I’ll be with my sister up north on Thursday and probably Friday, but I plan to be back in the office on Monday. I know we’ve got a lot to do.”
I hung up a few minutes later, struck by this softer side of Amanda.
We made it through the visitation the next day, though my legs and back were tired from standing in the same place for three hours. Lauren and I had bought some black foam core at a local art supply store and spent the previous night wading through boxes of family photos. We found about a dozen great shots of Mom and mounted them on the black board in vague chronological order. Foster Davidson supplied the easel, and family and friends crowded around the display.
It’s odd. You expect family and friends to attend. That’s what family and friends do when someone passes away. What had more impact on me were the visitors I had not expected. Silvio Cartucci was there. He ran the little fruit market my mom went to every week for most of her adult life. He was more choked up than almost anyone else. I hugged him and so did Lauren. Towards the end of the visitation, Diane, Amanda, and several other colleagues from TK arrived en masse. Some of them barely knew me, yet still they seemed to want to be there. That meant a lot to me, as did the unexpected hug from Amanda.
We drove to the cottage the following morning. It was a gorgeous day with not a cloud in the sky. Lauren is not really a cottage person, so her plan was to return to Toronto that night. I’m certainly not a cottage person either, yet I felt I needed a day or so up there to clear my head a bit. So we drove separately, Lauren in her Honda Civic, and I in Mom’s Ford Fusion. We hadn’t yet decided what we were going to do with the Ford, but until we did, I would drive it. I could see Lauren two cars ahead on Highway 400 as we headed north to Georgian Bay. Next to me on the passenger seat was a carefully sealed cardboard box from the funeral home. It was not nearly as secure, fancy, or fashionable as the fictitious URNSTAR 2000 might have been, but it would certainly make it safely to the cottage.
My mother had spent almost every summer of her life at this cottage. She loved it here. It was that simple. The cottage had been passed down through her family from one generation to the next. As an only child, our mother had bequeathed it to us. I can’t really explain why, but Lauren and I had never really taken to the cottage life, so when we became old enough to choose, we tended not to spend too many weekends there. Many of my friends thought I was crazy. Maybe I was, but I’m just not really the outdoorsy type. My trip to Cigar Lake – specifically, my unscheduled meeting with an aging Hector, and my time in the outhouse – reaffirmed my big-city tendencies.
When we arrived, it took us a little while to select the ideal spot. We didn’t want her final resting place to be right next to any of the paths criss-crossing the property, but rather tucked away on its own. When we found the place, it was an easy call. We decided to scatter her ashes at the base of a beautiful, large white pine about twenty yards up from the shore, in a secluded and peaceful corner of our lot. It was perfect. Lauren cried quietly as I gently emptied the box onto a thick carpet of brown pine needles. I held her hand, and we stood there for a few minutes in silence before heading back up to the cottage. We poured ourselves a drink and then sat on the deck overlooking the water. The prevailing west wind rippled the waves as the sun streamed through the pines and dappled the light all around our feet. Because it was only Thursday, there were not many boats on the bay. We shared a sense of finality now that the last official funereal act was behind us. Lauren dozed in the sun. I just sat there feeling warm, sad, emotionally spent, yet at the same time strangely renewed and invigorated. I couldn’t quite understand why.
Late in the afternoon, Lauren pulled out of the driveway for the two-hour journey home. She convinced me that she was fine on her own, though I offered to come home then too. It didn’t feel quite right, letting her leave on her own. But she insisted I stay if I wanted to. For some reason I did. After she’d pulled away, I followed the path back down to the deck and dropped into my chair. A loon surfaced just off the dock, quite close. I’d forgotten how big mature loons can be. It paddled around for a time, then ducked again. Because of the angle of the sun and how close the loon was to the shore, I could see it racing like a torpedo beneath the water until it faded from view to the east. I waited to see if it would surface nearby, but I never saw it again.
I’d been replaying my mother’s last few hours in my mind when I reached my decision. There was no agonizing, no tortured deliberations, no equivocation. I just seemed to arrive there knowing what I needed to do, as if it were utterly self-evident. I’ve seldom felt such certainty. Although it seemed I’d just made the call in that instant while sitting on the deck watching a lone loon, I realized in hindsight that the process had actually begun on my mother’s final night of life when she looked into my eyes while touching her temple, and then her heart.
I said it aloud, just to hear the words amidst the trees, the wind, the water, perhaps to make them real.
“Use your head, but follow your heart.” I said it twice more aloud.
That’s what she couldn’t say that night, yet still managed to convey with crystal clarity.
Sitting there on the shore of Georgian Bay, I knew. I knew exactly what I had to do. It might cost me my job, my career, and my reputation, but following your heart doesn’t really make allowances for such paltry concerns. I turned my plan over in my head for the next hour to make sure it all fitted together. Then I walked back up to the main cabin and reached for the phone. She answered on the fifth ring.
“Landon, it’s David. David Stewart.”
“Hello, Mr. Stewart. Are you missing Hector and me?” she asked.
“I truly am. And I keep forgetting to flush these newfangled toilets we’ve got here in the big city.”
“So what glad tidings do you bring? They better not have dumped me. I’m a handful when I’m cornered and angry!”
“Well, NASA doesn’t actually know about you yet, but my ultimate boss, Crawford Blake, the guy who runs the entire program for our firm in Washington, certainly isn’t your biggest fan. If it were up to him – and, by the way, he thinks it is up to him – we’d be picking another winner immediately. He doesn’t seem to see any value whatsoever in a more, um, mature and experienced candidate, like you.”
“I know the type. And what do you think, Mr. Stewart?”
“I think Crawford Blake is a jackass. And that’s why I’m calling. I want to freelance this on the sly to keep you in the game a little longer.”
“I don’t really know what you’re driving at, but I like the sound of it,” she replied. “What’s the plan?”
“It’s quite simple. Under deep cover, we’r
e going make it very difficult for NASA to reject you.”
“But NASA doesn’t even know I exist.”
“Not yet, they don’t. But if we can figure out how to float it, they will soon,” I explained. “We have to get this story into the media without any fingerprints, yours or mine, anywhere near it. If we can just start that ball rolling, the rest will happen on its own.”
We talked for a few more minutes as we brainstormed ideas. This was my world, so Landon didn’t say very much. But it was helpful just having her on the end of the phone as I proposed and then rejected ways to leak the story while still protecting us. It was still possible that Emily “By-the-Book” Hatch would insist that Landon be given her rightful chance. But NASA could still reject her almost immediately. We batted around a few ways to get the story out to the media, but none of them seemed to be quite right. There was always a flaw somewhere that led right back to me. My mind had been focusing on the Ottawa and Toronto media markets. Hearing Landon’s voice on the phone suddenly reminded me that we did actually have reporters stationed in other parts of the country. Yes, there it was.
“Okay, we’re getting there now,” I started. “When I worked on Parliament Hill, I had a great relationship with Sarah Nesbitt, the science reporter at the Vancouver Sun. I don’t know why I didn’t think of her before. I think the geography, her beat, and the fact that I actually know her, makes her the right candidate for us. If we bring her into this, I’m pretty sure she’d protect me. But we still have to find a plausible way for the story to have come to her without implicating either of us.”
For the first time since the call started, there was silence on the line. A minute passed as we thought.
“Wait,” Landon said. “You actually spoke to Chatter Haney in Mackenzie, didn’t you? Just before we met on the dock, right?”
The name rang a bell. I thought back to my arrival on the shores of Williston Lake and remembered the talkative guy at the charter company who was supposed to have flown me to Cigar Lake.
“I’d forgotten his name until you just mentioned it, but yeah, I spoke to that guy.”
“Did you introduce yourself to him, or ever give him your name?”
“Of course. I’d booked his plane and chauffeur to fly me to your place. He had my name and Visa card number.”
“Hmmmm. Was it your personal credit card or a company Visa?”
“It was a Turner King Visa,” I noted. “I try not to use my own card for business if I can avoid it. Why?”
“Well, then there’s our ticket,” she said, as if we’d solved world hunger.
“I don’t follow,” I replied, trying to catch up.
“Why do you think they call him Chatter Haney?” Landon asked. “You can’t keep his mouth shut with a pair of Vise-Grips.”
And so it was done. The plan came together easily after the “Chatter” breakthrough. We mapped it all out, refining it as we continued talking. We played out various twists and turns the plan could take and covered off contingencies for them all that still left us safe and beyond implication. It took about forty-five minutes before I was satisfied we had it right. We reviewed our plan and preparations in great detail along with our respective to-do lists, then Landon hung up to make an important call of her own.
You could never anticipate everything, but I felt comfortable we had our bases (and not to put too fine a point on it, our asses) covered. It all hinged on Chatter Haney and whether my relationship with Sarah Nesbitt was actually as strong as I thought it was. If I’d misread it, we might be in trouble. But I considered it a calculated gamble worth taking. Twenty minutes later, the cottage phone rang.
“Hello,” I said, figuring it was Landon but not certain. We didn’t have caller ID on the cottage phone. In fact, we still had the original rotary dial from the 1950s. We had only upgraded it from a party line a few years before.
“ ‘One might have thought already that God’s curse hung heavy over a degenerate world,’ ” the voice said in a low, almost furtive tone, and a bad English accent. The line was familiar but I couldn’t place it.
“Landon?”
“No, it’s Maxwell Smart,” Landon replied, her words marinated in sarcasm. “Who did you think it would be?”
“Well, the traditional telephone greeting is a little less cryptic than yours was.”
“I was just trying to get into the spirit of things. Spies always greet one another with a coded phrase when they’re on an operation.”
“Yes, but it’s helpful if the co-conspirator is in on it, too.”
“Well, I just thought you’d know how to complete that particular line,” she said, disappointed.
“I know it’s from a Holmes story, but I just can’t place it.”
“Well, I confess, I’m a little surprised. I had thought you were quite the Sherlockian.”
“All right, all right, which story?”
“It’s the first half of the second sentence from ‘His Last Bow.’ Among the most important and studied stories in the canon, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I’m bigger fan of the earlier stories,” I admitted. “So, can you actually recite the whole line?”
“Of course,” she said before switching back into her English accent. “ ‘One might have thought already that God’s curse hung heavy over a degenerate world, for there was an awesome hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air.’ ”
“He could certainly turn a phrase,” I said. “How did your big talk go?”
“Just spoke to the man, and he’s on board.”
“If he’s such a big talker, how do you know he won’t give us up if this starts to go bad?”
“Don’t worry your big-city head about that. Chatter will never squeal on us,” Landon said. “I saved his young son’s life four years ago. The man likes to talk, I grant you that, but he’d go to jail before he’d turn me in. We have a green light.”
“Does he fully understand how critical his role is and exactly what he can and cannot say?”
“Mr. Stewart, give me some credit,” she complained. “I spent twenty minutes on the phone with him. We actually did a rehearsal. That was my idea. Don’t worry, he gets it. We are Go.”
We tied up a few more loose ends and figured out our contact schedule and our next steps. The conversation was winding down when Landon piped up once more.
“So, Mr. Stewart, I’m grateful for your help, but I’m also curious. Why are you sticking your tender foot so close to a bear trap on my account?”
I wasn’t expecting that. I glanced out the window and could just see that big white pine down near the water in that secluded and peaceful corner of our lot. Its branches lifted and settled in the gentle breeze.
“Well, I guess it’s become clearer to me in the last few days since I’ve come back, but it’s really not that complicated. I truly believe it’s in our client’s interest. You won the contest. You have a great story. You are a great story. And it helps that sending you up is so obviously the right thing to do,” I said. “That’s the heart of it.”
After we hung up, I sat in silence in the cottage rehearsing the next move in my mind. The call would either be a solid first step down the right path or solid first step into the yawning jaws of that leg-snapping steel bear trap, which I’d then have to drag behind me all the way to the unemployment office.
Over the next hour, I dialled four times, being sent to voice mail on each attempt. Four times I hung up before the beep. I waited another twenty minutes and called a fifth time.
“Sarah Nesbitt.”
“Sarah, it’s a voice from your past,” I said in greeting. “It’s David Stewart.”
“David Stewart. Great to hear from you, man. And your timing is impeccable,” she replied. “You were about to be a voice from my present. So you’ve just saved me a call.”
“Really? What’s up?”
“I was just speaking to your former minister’s office about a piece we’re doing on the Citizen
Astronaut contest,” she explained. “You were next on my call list.”
“So you must know I’m at Turner King now?” I asked.
“David, I’m a reporter. I try to stay abreast of developments on my beat. It’s kind of what reporters do. I’ve done two stories on the contest already. Your name is at the bottom of every release, and my reading skills are passable. So, yes, I knew you’d made the move to TK.”
It was nice to know she more than remembered me.
“And your successor in the minister’s office isn’t exactly making life easy for me the way you always did,” she continued. “I’m missing you and you’re looking better and better in hindsight.”
“Sorry to hear that … I think,” I replied. “But perhaps I can help in another way.”
“My notebook is open,” she said.
“Well, can you close it for a moment? There are some ground rules that come along with this call. But I’m hoping you’ll think they’re reasonable under the circumstances.”
“Okay, my notebook is now closed. Let me know when I can open it again.”
“Strictly hypothetically, if I were to pass along the makings of a sizable story to you and you alone, along with a perfectly logical explanation for how you got it – and not from me – will you keep me out of it?”
“Well, without knowing exactly what we’re talking about, it’s hard to guarantee anything. But you know I’ve always been fair to you and you’ve always played straight with me. I’d say there’s a solid chance we can make this work. Does that cut it?” she asked.
“I think I can live with that,” I replied. “Okay, you can open your notebook again.”
“Actually, that was just a figure of speech. But my computer is turned on and my fingers are poised over the keyboard. What do you have?”