Up and Down (45 page)

She’d been down for about twenty minutes when the periodic signal tugs just stopped. After five minutes of the Scubuoy hose equivalent of radio silence, I was starting to panic. Should I dive in after her? Should I give my own tug on the hose and risk pulling the mouthpiece out of her mouth? Should I bury my head in my hands and moan? As I contemplated these burning questions, I suddenly realized I could see the light below getting stronger. Landon was on her way up. As she got closer, I could see she was looking up. She broke the surface and just held onto the gunwale. She didn’t move for quite some time. Eventually she spat out the mouthpiece. I gathered in the hose and shut down the Scubuoy. She lifted the flashlight into the canoe, then used her free hand to pull off the mask. She wouldn’t lift her eyes to mine. She just held on and seemed to stare directly into the side of the canoe with a look on her face I’d never seen. She was trembling a bit. Even with the wetsuit, she must have been cold.

“Landon, can you make it into the canoe? Your lips are blue. We should get you back and warmed up,” I said in a quiet and even voice. I really wasn’t sure what was happening.

That seemed to rouse her and she nodded and started to haul herself in. Fortunately, I was ready and leaned over my side to balance us. It helped having the extra ballast of the heavy Scubuoy resting in the bottom of the canoe. I handed her the towel and she draped it over her shoulders. It was not yet 5:00 p.m. but the sun was beyond the mountains. The light fell and so did the temperature. I paddled us back to the dock as quickly as I could, struggling to keep the canoe pointed at the cabin. Landon seemed to be in some kind of a trance. She was rocking just a bit, pulling the towel around her. I was nearly overcome with curiosity but to speak to her just then seemed like trespassing, so with considerable effort, I held my peace. Just as we glided up to the dock, but before my inept steering crashed the canoe into it, Landon reached down and picked up something from underneath the flashlight, and cradled it in her hands like a newborn bird.

When we finally came to rest, which happened quite suddenly, I grabbed the dock and held on.

“Now go up and get warm, I’ll deal with all of this,” I said with a little more authority than I usually employed with Landon.

She didn’t argue. Her face was very calm, even serene, as she headed up.

“Thank you, David.”

I considered my situation and decided to pull the canoe up on the pebbled beach next to the dock before unloading it. Good call. Trying to hoist the heavy Scubuoy up and onto the dock would probably have played out like a scene from
The Keystone
Kops Go Canoeing
, with me ending up in the lake. I stowed everything back in the storage space beneath the veranda and then tried to muscle the canoe back onto its rack. I used the same technique I’d watched Landon use. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that it wasn’t precisely the same technique. When I pulled the canoe up onto my thighs, I forgot to compensate for the shift in my own centre of gravity and quickly found myself seated on the ground with the canoe quite literally in my lap. It felt just excellent. I managed to slip out from underneath by rolling the canoe up and over my shins. I’ll have to check my files, but I don’t think I’ve ever experienced pain quite like that. It took me another fifteen minutes to position the canoe on the rack. When I finished, dusk had descended. I looked up and saw Landon leaning on the veranda railing watching me.

“I usually position the canoe the other way around on the rack, with the stern at the north end,” she observed. “That way I’m already headed in the right direction when I get it in the water.”

My heart sank and I briefly considered trying to correct my mistake, the operative word being “briefly.” I just shook my head.

“I’m not sure the canoe would survive another attempt,” I explained. I looked up at her in the fading light. “Are you all right?”

“I am more than all right. Come up.”

Landon had built and lit a fire in the stone fireplace. A mug of hot tea was waiting on the pine box. I collapsed into the chair. Landon sat in her usual place across from me.

“Okay, tell me,” I said.

“There’s not much to tell. He’s down there. He’s really there, just as you surmised,” she began. “The Beaver is upright with both pontoons pulled away at the front and folded behind, still attached by the rear struts. The prop blades are bent back in accordance with a nose-in impact on the water. The windscreen is smashed away, but the rest of the plane looks in good shape. It’s been sitting just off the dock for more than forty years while I’ve been flying all over hell’s half acre looking for a fiery crash site.”

“Um, is he there? Is he in the Beaver?”

“Yes. He’s still there, strapped in. Died with his boots on while flying. A perfect way for him to go. He couldn’t have planned a more fitting end.”

Landon reached for what looked like an oversized wallet sitting on the pine box. A damp water mark was left behind in the wood when she picked it up.

“My father always flew in a leather flying jacket with what was supposed to be a watertight zipper pocket. I was down there for so long because I was wrestling with a zipper that hadn’t functioned for four decades. It was a tad reluctant to cooperate. But I got it opened and can confirm that the pocket was not watertight. But I found this, and it’s not in bad shape for being down there for so long. I remember this leather wallet.”

She was smiling as she spoke, as if a heavy burden had finally been lifted. And I guess it had.

She opened the wallet and passed it to me. There, behind a foggy and yellowing plastic window, was a now stained photo of a young woman and her father standing on the pontoon of the very same Beaver that now rested on the bottom just a ways off the dock.

“I was fourteen in that shot. I’d just soloed for the first time. My father was beyond proud.”

I passed it back to her, at a complete loss for words. Landon’s eyes were now glistening in the firelight.

“I’m pretty nearly overcome. Reaching space and finding my father have been the two constants in my life. And now, thanks largely to you, I’ve done both. You can’t know what that means. I don’t yet know what it means.”

She paused and looked into the fire. Then she looked at me.

“Though inadequate the words may be, from the bottom of my heart, from the bottom of my lake, thank you. David, after forty years, you found my father. Thank you.”

I swallowed hard.

“Landon, I just pointed. You found him.”

The day I returned to Toronto, Amanda met me at the airport. I’d been feeling pretty good about my trip to Cigar Lake, but I very nearly forgot about it all when I spied her waiting outside the baggage claim area at Pearson Airport. As I waited for my bag to come down the conveyor, I watched as other passengers with
their carry-ons walked through the sliding doors to meet family or friends, or just to catch a cab. Each time the doors opened, I could see Amanda waiting on the other side. She hadn’t yet picked me out of the crowd so I could just look at her for the three or four seconds the doors were apart. It was nice.

We went out for dinner that night and I gave her a complete play-by-play of my weekend with Landon. Amanda had been a little skeptical about my east wind theory when I’d told her about it before heading west. Even after I’d shown her the forty-year-old meteorology report, she worried that I was getting my hopes up when the odds still seemed impossibly long. So she was downright pumped and proud when it all panned out.

We ended up closing the place that night. I had no idea where the time had gone. We just started talking and the night evaporated. I barely remember what I ordered or if I ate. Despite being preoccupied with one another, I couldn’t help but notice that my BlackBerry sitting on the table was flashing. Amanda, similarly afflicted with the need to check emails as soon as they arrived, saw it too. We both stared at it for a second or two, then I looked at her.

“You can check it,” she said. “I’d be forced to check mine if it were flashing, but it’s not.”

“I’ll just take a peek.”

I snatched up the BlackBerry and scanned the inbox. There was one new email.

“It’s from Kelly Bradstreet,” I explained, clicking it open.

I read it and started laughing. Amanda just smiled at me.

“What?” she asked.

“The
NASA
brass just had a look at the top line numbers from the tracking study that went into the field during Landon’s triumphant post-mission media tour.”

“Yeah, so dish the news already! I’m dying here,” Amanda said.

I scrolled down in Kelly’s email to get the numbers for the most important question of all.

“Okay, here you go. It was a North American-wide gen pop survey with a sample size of 3,800. Here’s how the all-important ‘launch or lunch’ question breaks down. The share of those who would rather watch a shuttle launch than go out for lunch jumped from 45 per cent last quarter, to 61 per cent last week,” I reported. “Wooo-hooo!”

We had actually moved the “launch or lunch” needle. Amanda thrust her hands in the air and looked on the verge of starting a conga line. No one else still left in the restaurant was prepared to join her, except me, of course.

In writing this book, I have been blessed with the encouragement and support of so many. As always, I thank Beverley Slopen for her wise counsel and experienced hand. I’m honoured that Doug Gibson is my editor and my friend, and I’m grateful for both. I owe a great deal to superstar publicist, Frances Bedford, who has kept my dance card full of literary festivals and other authorial gigs from coast to coast. I look forward to hitting the road again, for this novel. As well, copy editor extraordinaire, Wendy Thomas, has made this a better book. My thanks also to Doug Pepper, Bhavna Chauhan, and the rest of the McClelland & Stewart team for all of their efforts.

I must also thank CNN’s Ali Velshi and everyone on the CBC
Canada Reads
team for all they did for me in 2011. Ali’s passion and eloquence in the
Canada Reads
debates yielded
a year I’ll never forget and a debt I can never repay. I feel the same way about the wonderful people who lead the
Stephen Leacock Association
, and how they changed my life in the spring of 2008. It all started in Orillia.

Canada’s first astronaut, Marc Garneau, has been so helpful to me in writing this novel. While the part of this story that unfolds beyond our earthly bounds is clearly fiction, it could be fact, thanks, in no small measure, to Marc. I’m grateful for his time, expertise, and kind words about the book.

Dr. James Fallis and Dr. Martha Bushore-Fallis very kindly helped me capture in words the required technique for removing an inflamed appendix. I am thankful for their medical advice, and for so much more.

Beyond connecting with readers, one aspect of the literary life I’ve treasured in the last four years has been spending time with some amazing writers. International bestsellers Cathy Marie Buchanan and Andrew Pyper, friends both, are two of them. They were very kind to read this manuscript and offer up such wonderful words about it. They have my gratitude and whatever else I have to give.

Joe Thornley, my friend, and technically my boss in my day job, continues to turn a blind eye as I gallivant from one book event to another. I know I’m very lucky and I very much appreciate his indulgence, and that of my work colleagues.

To my wife, Nancy, and our two sons, Calder and Ben, merely saying thank you is wholly inadequate. Simply put, you have made this little odyssey of mine possible. That thought is never far from my mind.

T.F.

Toronto, 2012