Up and Down (22 page)

“Now let me go and get a selection of our most popular urns for you to consider,” Mr. Davidson proposed. “You’ll want to know about the features of each model, and of course, the cost. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be back in a moment.”

He was out the door before we could stop him.

There was something so surreal about calmly comparing funeral product accessories and options as if you were choosing pizza toppings or a set of kitchen knives. I just couldn’t restrain myself. At least I waited until Foster Davidson had left the showroom before I turned to my puffy-eyed and fragile sister. I unleashed my very best radio voice and made it up as I went along.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the
URNSTAR
2000, the very latest in advanced innovative ash receptacle design. Thanks to the power of secure-lock technology, you can say good bye to those embarrassing ash-cloud moments when inferior lids pop off without warning. But wait, there’s more! Lower-priced urns are slippery to the touch. But you’ll never drop your loved one in the
URNSTAR
2000 with our leading-edge super-grip adhesive surface. You won’t want to put this urn down. And you may not be able to. It comes in a variety of soothing colours and is so strong, it is rated to withstand baseball bats and selected small arms fire. So you and your loved one can rest easy. That’s the
URNSTAR
2000. Our operators are standing by …”

I started to lose it towards the end. Lauren looked perplexed for the first two sentences of my little improvised routine, but her resolve eventually crumbled and her face collapsed. Hyenas would have been intimidated by our outburst. We laughed hysterically, loud and long. At one point we were both doubled over, our heads near our knees. It just kept coming, wave after wave. I had thought we had no tears left. Wrong. Our eyes were streaming. Foster Davidson came running, probably ready to call for straitjackets and a padded van. He arrived back in the showroom to find Lauren and me with our heads lying flat on the cool surface of the board table, looking at one another with our arms splayed out to the sides. By then, we were in that satisfying transition from frenzied guffaws to unbridled chortles, with quiet giggles soon to come.
My breathing was almost back to normal, but my throat was a little sore from the workout.

It was one of the few times in my life when my habit of resorting to humour to avoid the serious really seemed to work. It felt like a turning point in our grieving process. It was just such a release. What I’d said wasn’t nearly funny enough to warrant our crazed reactions. Clearly, more was at play. It was as if all of the tension and heartache of the last six months, particularly for Lauren, had been released in one massive burst of emotion. I know Mom would have howled along with us. Perhaps she did.

We calmed down enough to assure Mr. Davidson of our mental stability, though he looked wary for the remainder of our meeting. Fifteen minutes later, we’d made all the decisions. It wasn’t that difficult. Because we were going to scatter Mom’s ashes at the family cottage, we decided against choosing an urn at all. That was probably a wise decision. I doubt we could have handled the selection process without reprising our earlier hysterics.

My BlackBerry chirped as we stepped out of the funeral home. I had a look at the screen and saw that it was Amanda calling. I raised my index finger to Lauren and stepped away to take it.

“Hi, Amanda.”

“Hi, David. I’m so sorry about your mother. Are you okay?”

“Thank you. We’re hanging in there. It wasn’t unexpected. We just didn’t know when. In the end, it happened quite quickly, which was probably not a bad thing.”

“My mother died two years ago and I’m not over it yet,” Amanda confessed. “I’m not sure I ever will be. I think it’s why I’m such a bitch sometimes.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. And you are not a bitch,” I assured her, adding “very often” inside my head.

“Well, I was a bitch yesterday. Sorry about that. Even though you should have brought us into it earlier, you made a pretty strong case for Grandma Percival. But I still don’t think it will fly.”

“Neither do I,” I sighed.

“Well, I won’t keep you. I know you have other more important matters on your mind,” she said. “I just wanted to let you know I was thinking of you. We’ll hold the fort till you get back. Don’t give all this stuff at the office a second thought. What you’re doing is the really important part of our lives.”

“Thanks, Amanda. I appreciate it. I’ll be with my sister up north on Thursday and probably Friday, but I plan to be back in the office on Monday. I know we’ve got a lot to do.”

I hung up a few minutes later, struck by this softer side of Amanda.

We made it through the visitation the next day, though my legs and back were tired from standing in the same place for three hours. Lauren and I had bought some black foam core at a local art supply store and spent the previous night wading through boxes of family photos. We found about a dozen great shots of Mom and mounted them on the black board in vague chronological
order. Foster Davidson supplied the easel, and family and friends crowded around the display.

It’s odd. You expect family and friends to attend. That’s what family and friends do when someone passes away. What had more impact on me were the visitors I had not expected. Silvio Cartucci was there. He ran the little fruit market my mom went to every week for most of her adult life. He was more choked up than almost anyone else. I hugged him and so did Lauren. Towards the end of the visitation, Diane, Amanda, and several other colleagues from
TK
arrived en masse. Some of them barely knew me, yet still they seemed to want to be there. That meant a lot to me, as did the unexpected hug from Amanda.

We drove to the cottage the following morning. It was a gorgeous day with not a cloud in the sky. Lauren is not really a cottage person, so her plan was to return to Toronto that night. I’m certainly not a cottage person either, yet I felt I needed a day or so up there to clear my head a bit. So we drove separately, Lauren in her Honda Civic, and I in Mom’s Ford Fusion. We hadn’t yet decided what we were going to do with the Ford, but until we did, I would drive it. I could see Lauren two cars ahead on Highway 400 as we headed north to Georgian Bay. Next to me on the passenger seat was a carefully sealed cardboard box from the funeral home. It was not nearly as secure, fancy, or fashionable as the fictitious
URNSTAR
2000 might
have been, but it would certainly make it safely to the cottage.

My mother had spent almost every summer of her life at this cottage. She loved it here. It was that simple. The cottage had been passed down through her family from one generation to the next. As an only child, our mother had bequeathed it to us. I can’t really explain why, but Lauren and I had never really taken to the cottage life, so when we became old enough to choose, we tended not to spend too many weekends there. Many of my friends thought I was crazy. Maybe I was, but I’m just not really the outdoorsy type. My trip to Cigar Lake – specifically, my unscheduled meeting with an aging Hector, and my time in the outhouse – reaffirmed my big-city tendencies.

When we arrived, it took us a little while to select the ideal spot. We didn’t want her final resting place to be right next to any of the paths criss-crossing the property, but rather tucked away on its own. When we found the place, it was an easy call. We decided to scatter her ashes at the base of a beautiful, large white pine about twenty yards up from the shore, in a secluded and peaceful corner of our lot. It was perfect. Lauren cried quietly as I gently emptied the box onto a thick carpet of brown pine needles. I held her hand, and we stood there for a few minutes in silence before heading back up to the cottage. We poured ourselves a drink and then sat on the deck overlooking the water. The prevailing west wind rippled the waves as the sun streamed through the pines and dappled the light all around our feet. Because it was only Thursday, there were not many boats on the
bay. We shared a sense of finality now that the last official funereal act was behind us. Lauren dozed in the sun. I just sat there feeling warm, sad, emotionally spent, yet at the same time strangely renewed and invigorated. I couldn’t quite understand why.

Late in the afternoon, Lauren pulled out of the driveway for the two-hour journey home. She convinced me that she was fine on her own, though I offered to come home then too. It didn’t feel quite right, letting her leave on her own. But she insisted I stay if I wanted to. For some reason I did. After she’d pulled away, I followed the path back down to the deck and dropped into my chair. A loon surfaced just off the dock, quite close. I’d forgotten how big mature loons can be. It paddled around for a time, then ducked again. Because of the angle of the sun and how close the loon was to the shore, I could see it racing like a torpedo beneath the water until it faded from view to the east. I waited to see if it would surface nearby, but I never saw it again.

I’d been replaying my mother’s last few hours in my mind when I reached my decision. There was no agonizing, no tortured deliberations, no equivocation. I just seemed to arrive there knowing what I needed to do, as if it were utterly self-evident. I’ve seldom felt such certainty. Although it seemed I’d just made the call in that instant while sitting on the deck watching a lone loon, I realized in hindsight that the process had actually begun on my mother’s final night of life when she looked into my eyes while touching her temple, and then her heart.

I said it aloud, just to hear the words amidst the trees, the wind, the water, perhaps to make them real.

“
Use your head, but follow your heart
.” I said it twice more aloud.

That’s what she couldn’t say that night, yet still managed to convey with crystal clarity.

Sitting there on the shore of Georgian Bay, I knew. I knew exactly what I had to do. It might cost me my job, my career, and my reputation, but following your heart doesn’t really make allowances for such paltry concerns. I turned my plan over in my head for the next hour to make sure it all fitted together. Then I walked back up to the main cabin and reached for the phone. She answered on the fifth ring.

“Landon, it’s David. David Stewart.”

“Hello, Mr. Stewart. Are you missing Hector and me?” she asked.

“I truly am. And I keep forgetting to flush these newfangled toilets we’ve got here in the big city.”

“So what glad tidings do you bring? They better not have dumped me. I’m a handful when I’m cornered and angry!”

“Well,
NASA
doesn’t actually know about you yet, but my ultimate boss, Crawford Blake, the guy who runs the entire program for our firm in Washington, certainly isn’t your biggest fan. If it were up to him – and, by the way, he thinks it is up to him – we’d be picking another winner immediately. He doesn’t seem to see any value whatsoever in a more, um, mature and experienced candidate, like you.”

“I know the type. And what do
you
think, Mr. Stewart?”

“I think Crawford Blake is a jackass. And that’s why I’m calling. I want to freelance this on the sly to keep you in the game a little longer.”

“I don’t really know what you’re driving at, but I like the sound of it,” she replied. “What’s the plan?”

“It’s quite simple. Under deep cover, we’re going make it very difficult for
NASA
to reject you.”

“But
NASA
doesn’t even know I exist.”

“Not yet, they don’t. But if we can figure out how to float it, they will soon,” I explained. “We have to get this story into the media without any fingerprints, yours or mine, anywhere near it. If we can just start that ball rolling, the rest will happen on its own.”

We talked for a few more minutes as we brainstormed ideas. This was my world, so Landon didn’t say very much. But it was helpful just having her on the end of the phone as I proposed and then rejected ways to leak the story while still protecting us. It was still possible that Emily “By-the-Book” Hatch would insist that Landon be given her rightful chance. But
NASA
could still reject her almost immediately. We batted around a few ways to get the story out to the media, but none of them seemed to be quite right. There was always a flaw somewhere that led right back to me. My mind had been focusing on the Ottawa and Toronto media markets. Hearing Landon’s voice on the phone suddenly reminded me that we did actually have
reporters stationed in other parts of the country. Yes, there it was.

“Okay, we’re getting there now,” I started. “When I worked on Parliament Hill, I had a great relationship with Sarah Nesbitt, the science reporter at the
Vancouver Sun
. I don’t know why I didn’t think of her before. I think the geography, her beat, and the fact that I actually know her, makes her the right candidate for us. If we bring her into this, I’m pretty sure she’d protect me. But we still have to find a plausible way for the story to have come to her without implicating either of us.”

For the first time since the call started, there was silence on the line. A minute passed as we thought.