How Happy to Be (27 page)

A story on the business pages speculates that without the Olympics, the big box retailer has lost interest in developing Tent City. If the residents return, they will find the land
detoxified and cleared of rubble. But so far, no settlers have shown up.

Elaine rises to make tea and gives me a kiss on the head. She knows I don’t respond well to sentimental gestures.

My father appears. “Would you like to take that walk, Max?”

He is carrying a pink shoebox that says,
8 ½ flat. Mr. Rojo’s Italian Leather
in rococo 1970 script. I know this box. It is the one possession my father protected from place to place. I get my jacket.

I follow him along a path that’s overgrown from lack of use since they put in the road and cars started coming over. Everything is exaggerated, steroided. The salal is hip height, dotted with old rain, the swordfern curls and bends, tickles my shoulders.

We emerge from the wet onto a wide green field that looks across the water toward Horseshoe Bay, a short cliff-drop down to the water. I have been here before. I feel like one of those movies where the character steps out of his body and there’s another one, and he keeps multiplying and multiplying; I feel like there are a million of me, shadowy and celluloid, fanning across the greenery.

He has taken me to the compound. My dad is facing the barracks and the small cabins where the monks lived, and then us. The place is cleanly painted, carefully boarded up, windows patched with perfect white shutters that look temporary; in the summer, things will change. Near the old buildings are new bungalows built from logs. They’re pretty and fairy tale next to the proletariat bunks we lived in. Ours
look like they were built from crayon blueprints drawn by children whose imaginations hadn’t kicked in yet: straight line, straight line, straight line, window.

“It’s a summer camp now,” my dad says. Of course: the tetherball pole in the middle of the field, the way the land has been cleared to discourage children from walking to the edge and falling onto the rocks.

“Do you know why I brought you here back then?” he asks me.

“Because I was lighting things on fire in Squamish?”

He frowns.

“Max, we came here because I thought it was the most beautiful place in the world, and because I didn’t have a clue what to do with you. You were your mother’s project.”

“Jesus, project …” But this is true. He means that he could have been alone forever, that he is a man who should have been alone. His love for my mother made him try to overcome his nature.

“I know you were unhappy, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better father to you.” His voice cracks. I don’t want to look at him because I’m afraid he’ll be crying, and I don’t want to comfort him. Now I know why I came here. This is the denouement, but it turns out I already know how it goes. Everything he is telling me, I have felt anyway my whole life. His answers aren’t a release but a burden, and I don’t want any of this, this nostalgia and heartache he uses to justify his vanishings, and goddamn it I don’t want to make him feel better. I don’t want to be the one who forgives and I’m shaking my head, no, no, no.

“Max,” he says, and he says it loudly so I look at him. He’s not crying. He’s looking at me. His skin is dry, creping around his chin. “Max –” He puts down the box and places his hands on my shoulders, an arm’s length away.

“Are we going to slow dance?” I say, and I’m the one who’s crying.

“Max, I’m so sorry that she died,” he says. This is the most he can give me. This is the sum of my father. It is almost enough. The air around us relaxes, a fist unclenched.

“Me too,” I say, wiping my face on my sleeve.

We don’t stand like that much longer. The wet ground is soaking through my runners and grass makes me nervous and suddenly I miss the city – I miss the surety of sidewalks – but we stay long enough to look out at the ocean and I count the boats obsessively, running the numbers across my teeth with my tongue.

We walk to Lower Lookout, a clearing closer to the water, two massive tiered rocks, one where the grown-ups would meditate and the other where the kids would take advantage of their closed eyes, making faces and giggling. The camp has planted a small cross on the big rock, and my father explains that they do a Sunday service here; the camp is Christian. I have to laugh. The prayer hall we gutted and turned into a school. The monks, the raisin nibblers, the endless declarations of progress, and all of it a great circle sailing.

The ground is slippery. On the edge of the rock, the mountains shake free the ocean and the city lies somewhere unseen through the fog. I take the box and empty my
mother’s ashes into the water, but a big gust of wind rises suddenly, pushing the plume in all directions, coating the rocks, the beach, my father’s feet, my hands, and then – swear to God – the rain comes. It thumps bricks from the sky, and all turns to mud.

I
WANT TO GIVE YOU THE DEATH SCENE BECAUSE YOU’VE
been so patient, but then again the death scene was private; not even my father got to be there. Bright Sunday morning, my blinds were open, but I was looking up at the ceiling and counting footsteps, in and out, the descent of doctors and officials. I was wearing blue terry-cloth shorts and a green T-shirt that read, Ms. Behaving. One of my last baby teeth was on the cusp of falling out, hanging from a thread at the back of my mouth.

“Maxime, I’m going to the hospital,” said my father from the doorway, my tired, tired father. He repeated himself: “Maxime, I’m going to the hospital now. You stay here with Mrs. Dalton.”

No one ever said the words
she died
. Everyone assumed it was my father’s job, but he must have forgotten. I knew anyway, I knew it from the silencing of the machines and some change in the rise and fall of the floors and windows, as if all the nervous panic that had settled in the house’s belly was finally hissing free. I heard Mrs. Dalton crying in the kitchen and the front door shut and I went to my window. An ambulance pulled up quietly, no siren, and two young men in white uniforms pulled my mother’s silhouette on a gurney, a white sheet shrouding her body. Across the street, a little boy bounced a blue rubber ball, a boy I’d never seen before, a blond boy with a curious face.

My father climbed in the back of the ambulance, and the doors shut. The wheels turned and pulled away and all that was left on the street was the boy with the ball, staring after the ambulance like he was watching television. A sharp taste of hatred rose up in my throat, and I tried to pry open my window to spit it out, but the window was glued shut from years of paint and it wouldn’t open. I ran downstairs, past Mrs. Dalton, through the living room, and onto the porch.

I stumbled down the stairs and into the garden. The boy saw me, turned and kept bouncing, like he was setting some kind of world record. Today, of all days, he would bounce the ball forever. He bounced it when she was alive, and he bounced it now that she was dead.

I gathered rocks and larger pieces of gravel from the garden and I began to pitch them, one by one, at the boy with the ball. At first I missed, the pebbles scattered on the street, so I moved closer to the curb. The boy stopped his bouncing and stared. I ran onto the road, grabbing more gravel as I ran, pitching it as I got closer. The boy looked over his shoulder, puzzled, wondering if I was aiming at something he couldn’t see, something he should be afraid of, and I kept coming, hailing him with stones until he was ducking and then whimpering and backing away, crouched and cowardly as I’d suspected and therefore, even more deserving, wailing under my hailstorm. There, I thought, do nothing, do nothing, do nothing, you blue ball bouncing fuck.

Mrs. Dalton grabbed me by the elbows and my rocks scattered over the street. She made all kinds of noises. Parents came out onto the street, a cascade of grown-ups murmuring and yelling things I couldn’t understand. My ears were filled with the scream of the ambulance pulling away. I hadn’t heard it when they’d taken her, but the sound was there suddenly, tearing at my skull. It was a signal, like something I’d read about happening to someone else.

F
RANNY BAUMGARTEN IS ICING THE CAROB CARROT
cake and she’s got seaweed frosting smeared all over her face. She offers me a fingerful.

“You poor kid, you don’t know how much that sucks yet, do you?”

“AND we have nutloaf!” she exclaims. I am getting the official island birthday treatment a day late because today is the day Franny’s mom returns.

The back door swings open and Elaine is standing there with the kind of big-boned woman people describe as
handsome, though her features are fine and pretty, like visitors to her body. Her eyes sweep the room until she sees her sticky daughter – hands up, a little guilty – and both their faces spark and smile and then there’s that awkward moment for the unhugged when the room gets heated up by kisses and proclamations of love for someone else. Franny wraps around her mother’s legs, beaming.

“I hope you don’t mind my joining you for your birthday, Max,” she says. “Your father said -”

Then my father darts in that open door, and he’s still wearing his gardening gloves, but he leans in and gives this woman a long kiss on the lips that’s more than friendly.

I raise an eyebrow and my father smiles.

I’m in my birthday suit, which is jeans and a T-shirt and lipstick, lipstick for the first time in days. Elaine’s half-undone tapestry dangles above the computer.

   E-mail:

There’s something I need to tell you, but I’m not sure –

   You can’t e-mail this kind of thing, the circuits couldn’t bear it.

Can you text message it over a cellphone? I type it in: PLZ CLL BG NWS. Maybe that’s not the best method either. You should probably use vowels under these circumstances. Delete.

I pick up the phone and dial and hang up and breathe and pick up the phone and dial and hang up and pick up the phone and breathe and it rings rings rings right into his voice
mail, and I leave one, as neutral as I can: “Hello, call me, can you? Yeah, uh, good. Okay bye.” My voice cramped and Smurfy. No he won’t know what’s up at all.

Elaine loves a dinner party, and this is Mrs. Dalloway worthy, if Mrs. Dalloway was vegan. The dining-room table is set with towers of candles emerging from seashells and driftwood, fresh-cut forsythias float in glass-blown bowls, a pan flautist wails on the stereo. Baskets of freshly baked whole-grain bread and plates of cucumbers and tomatoes soaked in oil and herbs from the garden colour pottery plates. The candlelight catches the stained glass leaning against the walls.

“It’s beautiful, Elaine,” I tell her, and I mean it.

Franny Baumgarten is wearing a red dress with as much grace as if she had been wedged into a lead pipe for the evening. “Nice dress,” I tell her as she pulls at the seams and snarls.

Dolores and my father carry trays of food to the table, their hips brushing against each other. Elaine brings out the nutloaf on a white platter, and we fall over our plates with hunger and I haven’t tasted anything so sweet and weird in quite a long time; everyone says smell but I believe it’s taste that pulls you backwards, and this chewy lumber taste reminds me of the compound smorgasbords with the piles of dishes that had been washed half-heartedly by children so that the food tasted always a little like peppermint soap.

Dolores is a serious person, but not in the way that Elaine is. She looks practical in her black button-down shirt, tucking Franny in at the table with one arm, a glass of wine in the other. She is a professor of classics who lived in San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and then came here after her husband died. She travels for research quite often, and reluctantly, she says, and this makes me think of Theo. She asks me about movies, and the city, tells Franny to sit up straight and Franny loves this; does her best impression of an adult. My father looks at Dolores with awe. They have been dating for a month.

The doorbell rings. I look at Elaine, raising my eyebrows. She shrugs to say no one is expected. Franny scrambles down to the ground and comes running and jumping and Theo McArdle is behind her, glancing at the stained-glass hangings on the walls, confused. And how this must look to him: four faces peering up, cheeks filled with nutloaf. For a brief moment I’m filled with disbelief too, and embarrassment at the chaos, and all I want is a pot roast and white china and a father in a V-neck sweater.

But Franny is waving a sprig of tarragon like an orchestra conductor, and Elaine is already up and fussing, filling a new wineglass, my dad is clearing seashells to make a space for Theo. So this is what I have, and it’s not that bad, really, because here’s the thing I figure out instantly: He started coming to me before he got my message. He has been on his way for a long time.

I notice also that Theo McArdle, age thirty-three, is wearing a backpack. Theo McArdle doesn’t own luggage either. I go to him, smiling.

T
HEO AND I ARE IN THE LITTLE HOUSE MY DAD HAS
been building, knee to knee across from one another on two miniature benches. It is our first moment alone, and so it’s the one I use to apologize for leaving him on the porch in Toronto. Theo looks distracted, and instead of accepting my apology, he says quickly, “I got the green light for England.”

“Oh,” I say, not a word, but a sound, the sound of a chest collapsing. We sit there quietly and I think of bobbies and the Queen’s corgis and what this means for what I’m about to tell him.

“The thing is, I might not take it,” Theo says.

“Might not,” I repeat back to him.

“I came out here because I feel like you and I make sense together,” he says, then shakes his head. “That’s not it. Hang on.” He runs his fingers over his face and looks at me, his knees pressing into mine. And then he lets loose a tangle of words whose order I will never remember, but in bits and pieces, they are seared into me, words like
you
and
extraordinary
and
us
and
effortless
and
love
. What he is telling me is that he is already fearless, but he wants us to be fearless together.