After (2 page)

“Just come home,” said Maman.

“Is Luc okay?” Luc is constantly swallowing his toys. That may sound funny too, but it’s not. It must really hurt to swallow a miniature car.

“Luc is fine. I’ll be waiting for you. I love you.”

She hung up. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to worry, but I didn’t. I simply pulled my backpack out of the closet and packed my U2 and Jacques Brel CDs, and the camera that my mother had given me for my last birthday. I’d had to rescue it from Aunt Sophie who threatened to throw it away when I took a picture of her on Christmas Day barfing on our molting green shag living room rug.

Mr. Enrique is, to say the least, an eccentric driver. He is also the weirdest man on earth. All the way to Montréal, he talked about his blind cat, Rococo. He told me that he would eat a human being before he’d eat his cat. Some choice. I don’t remember much else about the drive–just Rococo and Mr. Enrique and the only Spanish phrases that I could remember,
Dos cervezas por favor!
with the upside down exclamation mark–very hard to find on a keyboard, by the way.

Your father is dead.
That four-word sentence, spoken in my mother’s soft, flat voice, changed my life forever. Mine. Hers. My brother’s. My father had died. DIED in red capital letters, as enormous as the billboards on Times Square. No, bigger, more excessive, than anything I had seen in New York. A nuclear bomb exploding in my chest. Ten thousand guillotines chopping off ten thousand heads with a terrifying metallic clamor. The Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrating in flames in the sky over Texas. An electric shock pulsing through my veins and bones. My mind skittered around for some place to hide from the pain. There was nowhere.

That year was full of surprises and this was the first: sorrow hurts like hell. I swear my heart stopped beating. My throat constricted, and my belly hurt as if a wolf had eaten my guts.

I felt like a computer that had gone haywire, with images crazily chasing one another across the screen. My father would never wrestle with me again on the disgusting green living room rug that hid Cheerios and dog hair and the odd coin in its shaggy tufts. We wouldn’t stuff ourselves with Smarties and jelly beans and then play hand after hand of poker on Sunday afternoons. He wouldn’t pretend to be mad when he told me to turn off the lights in my bedroom after midnight when I was reading Superman comics. We would never watch hockey on TV on Saturday nights, slumped together on the old brown couch, eating popcorn.

I heard myself bawl from deep in my soul, if there’s such a thing as a soul. My mother gathered me in her arms. I had almost forgotten the warmth they had once given me. When you are fifteen, you don’t do this kind of thing anymore. I wanted her to hold me forever.

W
hen I woke up the next morning, everything seemed the same for a moment. I was in my own room lying on familiar faded cowboy-patterned sheets in a bed with a headboard like a ship’s wheel. The walls were as dry and cool as a wintry Arctic desert. I looked at the ceiling, freshly painted, thinking of an infinite white sea. I wanted to dive into it, not to drown so much as to freeze in it, to freeze time.

My guitar was leaning against the wall. It was a Christmas present from my father. He had taught me three songs that first day. My desk was in its usual place under a shelf of books neatly arranged by theme. The desk had belonged to my father when he was a kid and his initials were carved into one corner. I had cleared off all my junk from school before I left for New York. The only thing on it was a photo of Papa and me, grinning at the
camera with a big bowl of candy in front us, holding our poker hands to our chests. I remember when Aunt Sophie took it. Maman had just cleared Sunday lunch from the table–an old table made from pine and Luc was singing to himself as he played with plastic margarine tubs on the kitchen floor. There was a pot on the floor, because the bathroom pipe was leaking water through the ceiling. I must have been twelve years old.

The first thing that hit me was a wave of guilt so enormous that I thought I would die too. Why did I leave my father for that damned trip? I knew Papa had been depressed since he’d lost his job a couple of years ago. He’d started working on the boats before his sixteenth birthday and he loved the sea and the broad St. Lawrence. One day he was loading cargo on a slippery deck when he wrecked his back. Two operations didn’t help much. He must have tried to get hired on again at least a thousand times, but people told him he was too old and that the work was too hard. That was the beginning of the end. He was never the same after he lost that job. As far as my father was concerned, a man who couldn’t work wasn’t a man.

It wasn’t as if we’d had no warning. At breakfast on a stifling June day last year, Maman announced that she and Aunt Sophie were going shopping, and that Luc was
coming with them. “You’re such a big boy now,
mon cher.
” She pushed his hair off his forehead. “You need big-boy clothes for the summer.” He looked unconvinced. She headed off a tantrum with a promise of ice cream when they were finished and turned to Papa.

“Ben, why don’t you come with us?”

“Darling, you’ve asked me a hundred times. I’ll be fine here. You know I hate shopping.” Papa didn’t look up from his crossword puzzle.

“Francis, you’ll come right home from school?” She gave me a worried look.

“Sure.” I knew she didn’t want Papa to be alone.

Anyway, Papa was on his own that day. When I got home I found him lying on the cracked linoleum with an empty glass of milk and the vial for his pain pills beside him. There was a piece of paper on the kitchen table, held down by the salt shaker as if it might fly away:

I felt like he had slapped my face. My hands shook as I dialed 911. I knelt down beside him while we waited for the ambulance and turned his face to me.

“How could you, Papa?”

He tried to answer but he sounded drunk, as if he had a big potato in his mouth. It must have been the effect of the pills. I couldn’t understand him at all. After eight minutes and ten seconds, the ambulance came, and they
took him to the hospital. They told me that he was going to be fine, that he was a lucky man because I had found him. Not to worry. But I did.

I worried about him from that moment on, and I guess I’ll never stop worrying, even though he’s dead and beyond pain.

After I found Papa lying on the floor, I promised myself that I would never let him out of my sight again. All that summer, I followed him everywhere. When he was taking a walk on Rue St-Denis, I followed him. When he was in the garage, I hung out on the back porch where I could see him. When he went to Canadian Tire–he and I were both big-time browsers there–I went with him. I thought that as long as I kept him in sight I could save him. By the time school started again he seemed better, and by the end of the school year when I went to New York and left him alone, I thought he was fine.

Maman knocked on the door, but she didn’t open it.

“Come for breakfast, sweetheart.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Please. Come.”

I’d been home three days, and each morning the realization that my father was dead struck me like a slap. He couldn’t die like that. He just couldn’t.
Point final
Living without my father would be like losing an arm or leg. Suddenly, I had this image of myself when I was Luc’s
age. I was in the garage while my father tinkered with the lawn mower. I had caught a fly and I was about to tear its legs off. Papa stopped me. The scene came back to me in a flood of pain.

I buried my face in my pillow to choke my sobs. How would I get through this day? I heard the door creak as Maman opened it. Our house is so old that it’s always making noises. As long as I can remember, my bedroom door has creaked. Maman’s face was pale and her hair was pulled back into a ragged ponytail.

“Honey, come and eat something. It’s been so long.”

“Not hungry,” I replied.

“Then just have a glass of orange juice.” She sat on the edge of my bed and took my hand. I turned my head to the wall.

“Why did Papa have to die? Why not Grandpa? He’s always saying that he wants to go to heaven to be with Grandma.”

“Life is unfair. I don’t have answers for you.” Maman squeezed my hand.

She went back downstairs. With a huge effort I swung my legs over the side of the bed and pulled on a T-shirt and shorts. The backpack was where I had dropped it the night I’d come home. I found the Rangers T-shirt, wadded it into a ball, and stuffed it into the bottom drawer of my dresser.

Luc was sitting in his superhero pajamas at the wobbly kitchen table. It had lost one of its legs, and Papa had replaced it with a piece of broom handle. Luc glanced up and tried to smile. When he looked back to the cereal in his bowl, he seemed not to recognize it. I wasn’t hungry either. I didn’t think I could keep anything down. I ran through my mental list of favorite foods to see if I could imagine being able to swallow any of them, but even the thought of double chocolate cake made me want to gag. Maman handed me two pills, and I tried to drink a glass of water.