Remember The Moon (6 page)

“Dad?” A halfhearted call. I didn’t want to interrupt what I had going on with Maya, stoked that she hadn’t gone with Marcus in the canoe. We resumed our seats at the end of the dock, watching as the men disappeared into darkness. Maya hugged her knees inside her t-shirt. We didn’t say anything for a long time.

“I’m glad the moon is full tonight,” I said, finally. Maya shivered. “You cold?”

“No, I’m fine.” She rested her chin on her knees.

“Hey, you can lean against me if you want.” I hoped I sounded nonchalant but bit my lip to keep from saying something dumb when she wiggled herself between my legs and leaned back against my chest, her arms still hugging her knees. My wrists started to ache with the weight of us both, but I didn’t dare move. We sat watching the moon reflect on the water, silent in our thoughts.

“Is that them?” Maya sat up a little so I did too, hoping for the chance to put my arms around her, but she struggled out of her cocoon and stood up. I squinted into the darkness and could make out a shape getting larger and the slight white of tiny waves made by paddling.

“Call 9-1-1!” The cry had an unmistakable desperation to it. Maya looked at me with horror movie eyes, recognizing her father’s voice, and she bolted up the path.

On one knee, paddling hard, Pete, the most experienced canoeist, maneuvered the canoe towards the dock.

“Grab the lifejackets and get in!” I stood frozen. “Get in!” I leaped towards the lifejackets, threw them into the canoe, then stepped in carefully.

“Put one on!” Kneeling in a puddle in the center, I grabbed a lifejacket, almost falling backward as Pete pushed off from the dock with the paddle.

“Maya's calling 9-1-1,” I told Pete as I struggled to wrap the pale canvas ties around the orange-covered floats of my life jacket. “Where’s Marcus? Where’s my dad?” Pete paddled behind me so I couldn’t see his face.

“Jay, your dad fell in when the canoe tipped.” Pete’s tone was ominous. “Marc’s diving for him, but we need help.” His words made no sense to me in that moment.

“Marc’s diving for him?”

“When the canoe tipped, only Marcus and I came up.” We lurched forward violently with Pete’s strong strokes. I fell back, my ass now soaked.

Marcus surfaced with a small splash in the distance, flipped and disappeared again into the patent-leather surface of the water.

“You stay in the canoe, Jay. You need to alert the police or whoever comes to help. I’m going to keep diving.” I held both rails as the canoe tilted and Pete lowered himself into the water. Marcus came up, panting as he clung to the side of the canoe as Pete dove in.

“We’ll find him,” Marcus managed, too winded to say more. We watched Pete surface and dive a couple of times until I couldn’t stand it any longer. I pulled off my lifejacket and, despite Marcus’s protests, jumped over the side of the canoe, shivering with cold. I paddled toward Pete and took a deep breath. A rush of bubbles stinging my nose interrupted the underwater silence. For a moment my panic subsided, until in the blackness I lost my bearings, unable to tell up from down. A flash of something pale below my feet elicited an audible scream, my mouth filling with water as I kicked my way to the surface, gasping for air, coughing. I was a surprisingly long way from the canoe.

“Get back to the canoe, Jay,” Pete yelled from about fifty feet away, the canoe just beyond him. “You were just meant to be our lookout and to help keep the canoe in position. We’ll find him, I promise.”

“But I saw something!” I dove again, this time better prepared. I could feel my hair floating around my head and see the whiteness of my own hand. I searched the blackness for what I had seen before, moonlight touching something pale, a fish or human flesh.
Don’t let him be dead
. A muffled yell from above caused me to do a 180-degree swivel for one last look before breaking the surface. Pete, waving one arm, swam awkwardly toward the canoe, which now floated free, unmanned. I saw Marcus break into freestyle, heading toward Pete. I tried to do the same but instead flipped to my back in fatigue, twisting my head as I swam to stay on course, kicking hard.

By the time I got to the canoe, Marcus was already in, trying to pull my dad up while Pete and I each held an end steady. The canoe began to tip, but Pete held it and somehow Marcus got my dad’s limp body into it. Marcus kneeled over my father, who now lay in the bottom, skin gray, water sloshing against his face. Pete pulled himself up and in, resumed his place in the back of the canoe, and picked up the paddle. Marcus was attempting to give my dad mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions. I wanted to jump in and knock him out of the way. I needed to be the one helping my dad, but I had to cling to the outside of the canoe. There was no room for me with my father taking up the entire bottom.

My kicks contributed little to our progress toward shore and I knew I created drag for Pete. We could see flashing red and blue lights off to the right, through the trees of the shoreline, making their way along the road. Marcus tilted my father’s head back, pinched his nose and breathed into his mouth, desperation on his face as he waited a few seconds, then repeated.

“C’mon, c’mon, Mr. Cavor, breathe!”

I kicked like mad, every muscle in my body burning. At the dock, the police and paramedics were waiting. Two policemen held the canoe as the paramedics hauled my father in his cut-off jeans and black Rolling Stones t-shirt – the mouth and tongue mocking – onto the dock, where they began more chest compressions and clamped an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.

“Damn him! Damn him!” my mother yelled behind them, held back by Estelle. “I told him not to go!” She bordered on hysteria. Estelle tried to steer her away, but my mom wiggled loose and kneeled on the dock just behind the paramedics, crying.

“Help him for godssakes!”

I wanted to go and comfort my mom, but I couldn’t move, rooted to the spot. Maya had her head tucked into Marcus’s chest and his arms were around her, comforting her. Later, after they took my dad away in the ambulance, after I sat with my mom in the sterile, submarine green hospital waiting room, after the doctor appeared, his jaw clenched, after I held my father’s grey cold hand, his gold wedding band the only color, after the long, silent drive back to the cabin, I sat on the end of the dock, amongst the debris left by the paramedics – a syringe, torn plastic wrappings, a latex glove. The moon disappeared as the horizon turned a muted salmon-pink. I kicked my legs gently in the water, their undulating form below the surface tinged a pasty grey-green. I willed my dad to swim up, grab my feet, and laugh hysterically at his hoax. Peering down, attempting to see farther than humanly possible, I saw a flash of something move in the depths. I kicked violently, marring the image, lashing out at the sinister lake. A crow, perched high in a pine tree, cawed loudly at me. Still dressed in my damp Levis and t-shirt, I slid into the water, my eyes open, my heart pounding loudly, its weight crushing, yet oddly comforting, I urged the darkness to deliver me to my dad. Limply, I floated to the surface and took a breath of air despite myself. The crow cawed again and flew away.

My mother and I never went back to the Willis’s cottage after that day and I only saw Maya once afterward, at a game. I didn’t wave and she pretended not to notice me.

The floor blackened and I was back in the intake room, the fountain burbling ferociously. Alice sat demurely, waiting.

“That was rough. I had forgotten some of those details. I blamed myself for not being able to save him. I also hated Marcus for being there.”

“Yes. And you were angry. ”

“Very, yes.”

“Do you think your father’s death was in any way related to your own?”

“What? No! Why would you suggest that?”

“Sometimes as humans we subconsciously create our actions. You realize that before you became Jay Cavor, you chose the elements of your lifetime as him? You chose who your parents were. You chose a life where you were unable to save your father from drowning.”

“What?! That’s insane! Why would I choose something like that?”

“In order to grow, Jay. You also chose to die the way you did, at the moment you did.”

“Why would I choose to die in such a stupid way? Why would I choose to leave my wife and son alone?”

“Part of what you went to the Earth realm to experience was compassion and a sense of self-worth.”

“How has dying helped me learn that?”

“Think about it, Jay. How have your feelings towards Maya changed since you died?”

The floor trick had me back in Toronto on our wedding day at Casa Loma, where I now found myself dancing with Maya in the courtyard. Her auburn hair fell in loose curls around her shoulders, which were bare and soft. She appeared ethereal in her wedding dress, made of heavy satin with many tiny silken buttons that began between her shoulder blades, and created a sensual line across her bottom. I wanted more than anything to run my hand over them, over her. She whispered the words of the Nina Simone song in my ear.
My baby don’t care for shows, my baby don’t care for clothes, my baby just cares... for... me...

Our cheeks ached from smiling so much that day, and now as we danced alone in the courtyard, the wet stones of the old gothic stone mansion smelled fresh and damp, and the pollen from the canopied trees created a dusty yellow carpet under our feet. Faint strains of music came through the French doors, making our dance much more romantic now that we were not in the middle of the large dance floor in front of two hundred guests.

Reuniting in Pompeii after Maya's fortuitous breakup with Marcus, Maya and I traveled together for a few weeks before I returned to Toronto. She finished her program at the monastery and Marc seemed to disappear from her life. We spoke little of him. We married a year later and then waited a few years before deciding to have a child. When she told me she was pregnant, I was stoked, but sitting at work the next day I realized I couldn’t just quit my job anymore if I didn’t like it. My job and paycheck took on new importance. I needed to loosen my tie, stand up, and walk outside. I bought life insurance the next day. My father taught me that. I knew better than to leave Maya and a baby with nothing if I died a stupid, untimely death. A few months after my dad died, my mom was forced to sell the house, and we moved into a small rental cottage in the Beaches. Her work as a nurse at Toronto General was steady, but I worked as a bartender in the evenings to put myself through University.

I loved being a dad, though I wasn’t great with the baby thing: incessant crying, poopy diapers, cranky wife. But I cherished those moments when Calder's tiny sausage-like body with its sour milk smell melded into mine and he fell asleep on my chest. And those belly laughs. I couldn’t get enough of those.

I imagined what felt like tears form in my eyes as I remembered cradling his curled newborn body against my chest one more time, a tiny baby hand outstretched across my shoulder. In another memory I held his naked body in the bathroom mirror, a look of wide-eyed awe on his face, and I held his tiny hand as he learned to walk naked in the grass. I hid with him in the hollowed base of a giant shrub as Maya pretended to look for us, his giggles giving away our hiding place.

Once Calder started walking and talking, I found him a bit more fun. He laughed those great baby laughs when I threw him high into the air, a look of both terror and pure joy on his face that always made me catch him and clutch him into a big bear hug. Yet I’m ashamed to admit I was jealous of the bond Maya had with Calder, his begging to be pulled into her arms, something he rarely did with me. One chilly afternoon as I tried to put Calder's coat on, he pulled away and yanked the coat out of my hands, demanding ‘Mama do it!’ in that way kids do. I saw red.

“Are you teaching him to hate me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s such a mama’s boy! Christ, he won’t even let me put on his goddamned coat!”

“Jay, he’s three.”

“You’re coddling him.”

“I’m not. This is what babies do, Jay. They cling to their mamas.” Calder stared at me across Maya's shoulder, as if to mock me. I stuck my tongue out at him and he began to cry.

“Oh great. Now he’s crying. Maybe if you got home in time to put him to bed once in a while, or didn’t spend the entire weekend doing your home projects or tuning out in front of the TV, you would have a better relationship with your son!” Her anger surprised me.

I sunk further into Alice’s white couch.

“I took so much for granted. After that little spat, I did my best to make it home earlier, and Maya, to her credit, worked harder to find times for Calder and I to be alone together. God, what an idiot I was! Of course, she never took my shit, one of the many things I loved about her. Things improved when Calder turned four and he suddenly became Daddy’s boy. We took trips to Home Depot where he rode the lumber cart, dove his hands into boxes of screws, and I taught him the names of all the tools. I guess that fight with Maya was a good lesson for me. Nothing ever stays the same for long. Shit. I guess I never fully appreciated how much I loved her. I took her for granted.”

“Good, Jay. What about Calder?”

“I took him for granted too. Now Calder has a full life ahead of him and will have to live it with the difficulties of being a boy without a father. I hate knowing what kind of life he has in store. It sucks.”

“It’s a life Calder chose, Jay. From this world, before he was born. His spirit needed to learn through the difficulties of not having a father, in order to advance his own growth. He too has lessons to learn, lessons he will learn through your death.”

“That’s messed up.”

“Not really. It will soon make more sense for you. Can you see how your death might have also helped Maya in her path?”

“No. She seems pretty miserable. I find it hard to get close to her, like she has a shield around her.”

“Yes, that’s common among newly grieving people. She will be closed off for a while. But you can give her signs that you’re around, watching over her.”

“Signs?”

“You know: smells, lights turning on or off, music that comes on the radio that is meaningful to you both, dreams, that sort of thing.”