The Journey Prize Stories 21 (27 page)

The next day, I drove back to Tofino, back to my cabin and the bush. I arrived at dusk and slept. In the morning I began to paint. The only cabin I use is one large room with windows facing every direction and a bedroom loft above the little
kitchen. The rest of the space is studio – floor spackled with paint, two easels in the middle of the room alongside a large white mobile wall. I use a narrow counter at one end of the room as a pallet. The other side of the room is racks and slots for paintings. Space is so tight I've removed most older canvases from their frames and rolled them.

That morning, I began from the bones of abstract work I'd done off and on the past two years – a dozen paintings that were not yet realized. My best work comes from painting over an existing piece, starting again without starting again.

For eight solid hours I worked with brush in hand. Painting is physical and draining, but I worked on three different canvases before I lay down and slept. Over the next five days all I did was paint, sleep, and eat. I pushed until this old body teetered on the edge of collapse. And then I went into town. It was Tuesday, two days after Alvin's second-to-last radiation treatment. Someone should have been home, but I called all day without getting through. I left two messages and then checked at the post office for any general delivery mail. There was a card from Alvin postmarked in May. “I have stage four cancer. I'd like to see you. I'm writing because I don't know how else to get in touch. Will you come?” Some words were scratched out. At the bottom he signed it only with an A.

The card was two months old and although I told myself that, I couldn't help but read it as today's news. My body slumped against the post office wall. The clerk stepped from behind the desk, but I waved her off and managed to stand.

I returned to the cabin to sleep that evening. The last quarter-mile along the ridge that leads to my house was a
struggle. My legs were watery weak. Twice I had to rest where I wouldn't normally even pause.

I spent the next day in bed, didn't return to town until that Thursday. Sandy answered the phone. “They've stopped the radiation.” That was the first thing she said. “They found more cancer. In his brain.”

“I'll be right down. I'll come tonight.”

“We're leaving this afternoon. There's an alternative treatment centre in Tijuana. We've been considering it for a while. Sort of famous for holistic treatments.”

“And they say they can help?”

“They're willing to try.”

“Sandy, it's a long way for him –”

“Let me put Alvin on. Hold on a second.”

Alvin grunted into the phone. “So she won that battle,” I said, meaning it to be a light-hearted comment though I knew it didn't sound that way.

“There's only one battle here, Dad, and we're all on the same side.”

“I know. I'm sorry.”

“So am I.”

“If these are your last days, Alvin, don't spend them in Mexico. You could paint. We could paint together.”

“I've lost one eye. I'm half-blind in the other. I'm just trying to live, Dad.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“I don't know.”

My fingers ran down the pad of buttons on the phone, touching but not pushing. “I've been working since I saw those paintings of yours. They've travelled with me. They live
in my mind. Best things you've ever done.”

“I know. Even when I was working on them I knew. It was like I'd channelled something, brush guided by a force beyond me, as though the paintings weren't even mine.”

“You said you'd written to your mother. Who else did you write to?”

“My mother? Dad, I didn't –”

“Never mind. Forget it. I'll see you when you're back. You hang in there, okay?”

It took me an hour to walk the path back to my cabin. I had to rest at every chance. It took two days before I could pick up my brushes. Even then, all I could do was stand and stare. All my life I've thought I had something to say. Pile all my paintings end to end and they couldn't whisper a word of comfort now. I set down the brushes, looked out the windows – out over the ocean, across the great expanse of grey that meets the sky in a fine, thin line. I can stare out there for hours, watching the weather change, watching distant boats, mind racing out over the Pacific, out toward Japan and China.

That weekend I bought a roll of quarters. At the library, I wrote down every number for a Sylvette or Lysanne Turcotte in Montreal. I called them all from the pay phone outside the Co-op with no luck. When I was done, I called Alvin's neighbour for an update.

“What am I supposed to know?” Sue said. “What am I supposed to tell you? They just left.”

Back in my cabin, I set those abstracts in storage slots and worked in the garden. I harvested my marijuana crop, carried
it into town. I called Sue again. She said they were giving him some tests. That was all. No other news. I spent the rest of the week putting frames together. I gessoed them, then drove back to Victoria.

I used the key they kept under a flower pot. Up in Alvin's studio, I lay the paintings out, drank from them again, then gathered together the half-dozen smallest canvases, the portraits I believed were of Sylvette – her face melting away into abstract forms. These I took with me.

In my studio the next morning, with those portraits of Sylvette arranged behind me, I raised my brush and stared again at a blank canvas, bent close until I could make out its dimpled skin, could smell the dried gesso. At the bench, where all the colours of God's prism are squeezed in drips and drabs, I touched my brush to the azure blue of a summer sky. Standing at the easel, I turned slowly and faced Alvin's paintings. I crouched by the first – a rich vision of a face turned raw and bloody across the top of the painting. It was as though the skull had been sliced open and the top lifted off. The face itself was green, grey, and blue, and I brought my brush so close to the dark shadow of the nose that it might have touched. I backed away, dropped the brush, and for a moment paced the room. I walked end to end, looked out at the ocean, but not even that could hold me. At last, I returned to the painting. I raised my brush and this time it did touch.

In the early 1900s, Chaim Soutine used to send an assistant to buy paintings from hawkers on the banks of the Seine. He'd use these as a base. He'd begin from them. I'd done similar things throughout my career, although never with a painting of my son's. In one way or another every artist works from the
paintings of others. We all stand on each other's shoulders, we all take and we all give. It's the cycle of art.

Next morning I returned to town and called Sue. “They're coming home,” she said. “But it's not good news. They're going from the airport straight to the hospice.”

My body went slack. I leaned against the phone booth to stay upright. My mind had formed a scale from worst news to best and this was as close to the worst as I'd allowed myself to consider. I managed a few words of thanks into the receiver, backed out of the booth and walked away.

The Sooke Hospice is a quiet retreat in the hills – a peaceful place where people go to die. I arrived in the evening after a rain. The earthy smell of a warm, damp garden was rich in the air. A woman in a black leather coat stood smoking under the awning. I walked past her and through to reception where a nurse led me down a short hallway. Alvin was propped up in bed, ashen and gaunt – the withered branch of an ancient tree. Sandy was curled in the chair beside him, and my entry woke her. She rubbed her eyes, and Alvin turned my way. He seemed to smile as he raised a hand. He said something, but it was just a croak.

“Lysanne,” Sandy said. “She arrived last night.” And then the woman in the leather coat was at the doorway. Her stringy black hair fell over her face, but even through that veil she looked like her mother – the strong jaw and muscular face, shoulders set at attention. This could have been Sylvette walking into our lives twenty-some years ago.

Sandy stood. “Lysanne, Skylar.”

Lysanne stepped forward. “How do you do?” She rose to her toes and kissed my cheek. “I do not speak English well.” She flashed a wide, embarrassed grin, almost giggled.

“Welcome,” I said. “It's so good. I mean.” I turned to Sandy unsure of what Lysanne could understand. “You should have said. You should have told me.”

Alvin raised his hand for Lysanne. He spoke little above a whisper, and she leaned close to listen. She nodded as though she understood, although the language barrier must have prevented him from getting words across. When she backed away, Alvin managed to sit up, and with our help, he stood. He posed for a photograph with me and Lysanne. We rang for the nurse. She took another, which included Sandy, then one of just Alvin and Lysanne, one of him with Sandy, and finally one with me – the two of us trying to smile, my arm around his bony shoulder.

Alvin slept and Lysanne went out to smoke again. Sandy joined her. I watched Alvin, his rib cage barely registering each shallow breath – every one a labour to produce. His face, once round and full, had been chiselled away. It was now just bone and skin.

Sandy returned and I listened as she made herself comfortable. “So?” I said after a while.

“So,” she said.

“Lysanne.”

Sandy nodded, gestured outside. “She's talking to someone on the phone.”

“I didn't mean that. I meant –”

“I know what you meant.”

I stretched out my legs.

“He's happy,” Sandy said. “It's made him happy.” She leaned her head back and for a moment I thought she was going to sleep. “Months ago, when we first talked about going to Tijuana, it seemed so expensive. In the end, the money was nothing. It was the cost in time. It really just exhausted him. He could have spent a few more days with Lysanne. A few more days at home.”

“I know.”

“It feels like it's been so long, but really it's only been three months. Hardly a beat of time.” She raised her head, opened her eyes, and looked at me. “Sometimes I wonder if all this effort to prolong life was more for me than him.”

“Have you talked to him about this?”

“In a way.”

“Now's the time. I mean, if it's important, don't let him go without talking this through.”

She snorted. “That's rich, you telling me I need to communicate. The things the two of you need to talk through could fill a book.”

I did my best to smile, but I knew it wasn't coming through. I turned back to Alvin, still and peaceful-looking. “Maybe that's it. There's so much there's effectively nothing.”

“That's one way to look at it.”

“We connect through our work.”

“That's a bullshit answer.”

“What do you want from me, Sandy?”

“I don't want anything from you. Maybe Alvin does though. Maybe you do, but can't see it.”

“I believe it's possible to connect through the paintings, that our shared endeavour brings us together on a different level. I know you'll never understand, but it's true.”