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It was near dark when I drove across the Pierre Laporte Bridge and the snow was coming thick and fast.
My stomach started to churn nervously as I got closer to where the old man was. I pulled off the road once I was across the St. Lawrence, gassed up and went into the little variety store next to the gas station to buy a city map.

I made my way carefully through the driving snow into the narrow streets of the Old City, crept down rue St. Louis, found rue Haldiman and turned right, holding on to the Bimmer as it fish-tailed its way up the grade. I turned off into an underground municipal parking lot, shut off the engine and immediately wished I hadn’t come.

What the hell was I going to say to him? Hi, thanks for the postcard even though I waited ten years for it, now let’s talk about how you ruined my life?

I sat there with my hand on the ignition, trying to decide what to do, knowing deep down I had to go through with this. Finally I got out of the car, grabbed my backpack and trudged up Haldiman, head down into the snowy wind. The ancient stone building stood silent at the corner of two narrow streets. The windows were dark but there was a dim light on over the door. I crossed the street and knocked, so nervous my throat went dry, rehearsing in my mind what I’d say when the old man opened it.

REPLAY

Back then, mornings were the best times.

I’d get up early, before Mom or Dad, and make my way downstairs, one hand on the wide banister, the other knuckling the sleep from my eyes. In the kitchen
I’d stand on tip-toe, stretching across the counter-top to turn on the coffee machine. Dad set it up for me each night. Switching it on each morning was my special job, and I never forgot. Then I’d pad into the family room and click on our little fourteen-inch TV, turning the volume down to zero. While the cartoons flickered silently across the screen I’d build with my Lego set. I had tons of the stuff. I could make boats, rocket ships, weird-looking monster trucks with strange machines mounted on them that could do anything my imagination came up with.

There I’d be, fitting bits of coloured plastic together while the coffee-maker spluttered and gurgled out in the kitchen, filling the air with the heavy aroma of strong coffee. Every morning I’d think, I can’t wait till I’m old enough to drink coffee. I’ll drink it strong and black from a thick white mug, just like my dad.

After a while I’d hear him banging around in the kitchen. I’d smell toast and hear cereal rustling in the box and hissing into the bowl. I’d go into the kitchen and show him what I was making, pointing out on-board computers, guns, or magic machines that could turn rock into gold or make bad guys disappear and transport them to horrible hot planets with no gravity or clean air. He always listened carefully to my explanations.

“You’re gonna be an engineer,” he’d say, “or a designer. Yep. You’re creative, an artist.” Then he’d laugh. “Just like your old man.”

We’d eat our cereal, then have toast with Robertson’s marmalade. I loved the sharp sour-sweet taste and dark orange colour of the jam, the shreds of bitter orange rind and chunks of ginger. Dad would
listen to the news, talking back to the radio, making comments I didn’t understand.

After breakfast he’d pour the rest of the coffee into his thermos, put on a fresh pot for Mom and stack our dishes in the sink while I got his lunch-box out of the fridge for him. Then he’d take a last sip of coffee from the white mug, slosh it around in his mouth and swallow with a huge
gulp!
, crossing his eyes at the same time. I’d laugh and he’d kneel down and hug me in his strong thin arms and kiss me goodbye. His face would smell of shaving soap.

He’d drive off to work at the tire factory and I’d pad back into the family room to watch more cartoons.

One morning I was sitting in a warm square of sunlight on the rug, building a boat that could convert to an inter-galactic space-fighter. The coffee machine had long since stopped gurgling and the kitchen was silent. I waited and waited for my father’s footsteps.

Eventually, Mom got breakfast for me. She looked pale and angry and when I asked where Dad was she snapped at me.

“Just eat your breakfast and get to school,” she said, throwing down a dish towel and rushing from the kitchen.

At supper that night I asked her again, “Where’s Dad?”

“He’s gone away,” she said. I started to cry. “Don’t ever talk about him again.”

That night I lay awake for hours. Then I climbed out of bed, took up my Space Invader flashlight and stole through the silent house. In the bathroom I dried my eyes, noticing his sharp scent on the towel. I crept
downstairs, somehow knowing that the farther down I went, away from the safety of my bedroom, the less control I had over what was happening to me. I entered the living room and sat in my father’s chair beside the little fireplace and turned off the flashlight, staring into the silent empty dark. There was a hole inside me like the dark, I thought, and it hurt.

I climbed from the chair and slowly descended the steep narrow stairs to the cellar, afraid. The air down there was damp and smelled of cedar wood. I had always liked that smell, but now it threatened from the darkness. I stood on the stair, holding tight to the railing. My flashlight beam seared like a laser through the dark cellar and picked out the curled cedar shavings on the cement floor around the legs of his stool and on the surface of the work bench where we did his sculptures and carvings. I played the light beam back and forth across the bench, looking for his carving tools and files and sandpaper.

They were gone.

N
OBODY CAME TO THE DOOR
of the stone building. I knocked some more, then stepped off the narrow sidewalk and squinted against the snow, trying to see if any lights came on. None did. I peered through the slit between the drapes in the large window that gave out onto the street, but the room was too dark to see.

That’s when I noticed the sign,
Appartement à louer
, in the corner of the window, and swore at myself. Then I thought, it wasn’t necessarily his apartment that was for rent.

I adjusted my backpack, wondering what to do. I couldn’t stand in the street all night hoping he’d come back—I’d freeze to death. The thing to do was rent a room somewhere and come back early.

I looked up and down rue Mont Carmel—not that I could see very far in the blizzard—and noticed a sign hanging out over the sidewalk across the intersection. I crossed over to read the sign: Auberge des Gouverneurs. The building was a lot like the old man’s—block-shaped, built of stone.

The room they gave me was a comer garret jammed in under the sloping roof, the kind of place you just knew was described in the hotel brochure as a quaint
chambre
dripping with old world ambience. The window looked out over the intersection.

I dumped my pack on the floor, kicked off my soaking wet running shoes and stripped off my socks. I put the socks and shoes on the ancient radiator and hung my coat on the hook on the back of the door.

Then I turned out the lights and sat at the window as I chomped through three granola bars. The wind moaned and whined around the corner of the hotel and under the eaves. Across rue Mont Carmel was a small park, empty and dark despite the lamps that glowed weakly against the swirling snow.

Why was the old man in Quebec City? I thought Then I asked myself, why wouldn’t he be? He moved around so much you’d have thought he was dodging the cops or a credit card company. I looked down at the door to his building again. Maybe he wasn’t here at all. Maybe he had moved on again.

I took a shower, went to bed, and dreamed I was in an old house running down endless corridors from room to room, frantically searching, searching.

Every day after school I burst through the wide glass doors, hopped on my BMX and raced home, pedalling like fury, flying down the hill, sweeping around the corner of our street, looking for his car in the driveway, hoping that everything would be all right again.

Then one day the first postcard arrived—from Montreal. It had a big picture of a church on it and my name and address stamped on the back. But no message. And no signature. Just DAD in block letters. My name and address and DAD were made with those rubber
stamps. I got a postcard almost every week after that, from Halifax, Vancouver, cities in the States, even one from Mexico.

Why didn’t he say anything to me on the cards? I wondered. I wanted him to tell me what I had done wrong, why he left me, why we couldn’t have breakfast together any more. Just tell me what I did wrong, I’d say out loud as I looked at the postcard, staring at that single word stamped in block letters, gripping the card so tightly it creased in my little hands. Tell me, so I can fix it. Tell me and I won’t do it any more.

I saved all the cards in a Nike running shoe box, and every night before I went to bed I’d get them out and look at all the pictures from cities where I’d never been, crying, frustration and rage jamming me inside like floodwater surging against a cracked dam, hating and missing him at the same time, hating myself because somehow I must have made him want to leave.

At first I looked forward to getting the cards. Then, I don’t know, they seemed to mock me. I didn’t want them any more. I wanted him.

One night I carefully, slowly, ripped the postcards into small ragged pieces, so small nothing of the pictures or the printing remained, and stuffed the pieces into a supermarket bag. The next morning I took four more bags and poured my Lego pieces into them. I didn’t want to be an engineer any more. I didn’t want to be an artist like him. I took the postcard bits out to the road and dumped them into the sewer. Then, one by one, I carted the bags of Lego to the sewer grate, pushing the bright coloured pieces through the slots. They sounded like rain as they struck the water.

That day after school I didn’t go home right away. I rode out to where the railway trestle crosses the Etobicokc River. I pushed my BMX along the tracks. The wide tires jumped and bucked on the ties. When I was halfway across the iron trestle, I shoved the bike over the edge, watching it fall as if in slow motion to splash into the muddy river.

When I got home my mom met me at the door and asked me a dozen questions at once. Where had I been? Why was I so late? Where was my bike?

“I hate him,” I said. “I’m glad he’s gone.”

Not long after that the postcards stopped coming.

I
AWOKE TO THE WHINE
of a vacuum cleaner in the hall outside my room. Realizing I had overslept—the story of my life—I jumped out of bed and took a look out the window. It didn’t look much like an April morning out there. The sky was a hard porcelain blue. The wind of last night had carved long curved snowdrifts across the park and through the intersection, obliterating the sidewalks.

I dressed quickly, glad my socks and shoes had dried during the night, and went down into the street. It was cold but the sun hinted that the snow wouldn’t last too long. There were no footprints leading to or from the old man’s building. I knocked on the door. No answer.

After a sumptuous breakfast of doughnuts and coffee at a shop down rue Haldiman I trudged back, not too hopeful that anything had changed. I guess I was tired from my poor night’s sleep and bitchy from the tension and frustration, because I suddenly found myself pounding on the door and cursing. Seizing the doorknob, I shook it hard, turning it as I cursed. The door swung inward.

How stupid do you feel, Wick? I asked myself. This is an apartment building, right? There’s a sign in
the window,
Appartement à louer
, right? You
could
have tried the door last night.

I found myself in a large dim foyer. There was a door to my right with a name tag over the bell button: Gauthier. Ahead of me, stairs. I took a deep breath and went up, gripping the banister to steady my hand. There appeared to be one apartment per floor, and the one on the fourth floor was empty. None of the name tags on the other apartments had the name Chandler on it.

Which meant my old man was gone.

Which meant I had wasted a lot of time, gas and money. Not to mention the hell to pay when I got home. But at the same time I was relieved.

I stared at the door with no name tag. Had he really lived there? Then I thought, there’s only one way to find out.

It was easy to force the lock with my pocket knife, just like the private eyes do in the movies. The apartment was bare and lonely, washed with flat grey light. I took a quick look around. There was a galley kitchen, a small room with a stripped bed and a night table, and one large airy room with a couple of threadbare stuffed chairs. The painted floorboards creaked softly as I walked over to the window overlooking the Parc des Gouverneurs and the St. Lawrence River.

I caught the faint remains of a smell I recognized, and a Replay flashed through my mind. I looked around, searching the floor. There were a lot of gouges in the wood, as if someone had had a desk or table under the window. I got down on my hands and knees and peered under the radiator. I picked up a small wood shaving, curled in tight loops. I smelled it. Sure enough, cedar.

I looked out over the gently sculpted snowdrifts that stretched across the park. The tall old maples stood quiet, black against the snow and the hard blue of the sky.

The old man had lived here, all right. He had sat at his carving table and seen what I was seeing now. What had he done in Quebec City besides carve his little sculptures out of wood? Did he have friends here? A wife? Why had he come here? Why did he leave? And where was he now?

And why had he sent me that postcard after all those years?

I
DROVE HOME THE SAME DAY
. I won’t go into the details about the greeting my mother gave me. She didn’t know whether to be relieved that I was home safe or outraged that I had taken her car, made an “unauthorized withdrawal” from the bank—that’s what she called it—by forging her signature and went looking for the ex-husband she never wanted to talk about. She decided to be outraged. I didn’t really blame her. She made a lot of threats and asked a lot of questions that began with “How could you?” I figured my best bet was to look like I was sorry and not to argue, just wait until she ran herself down.