Wild Fell (14 page)

I will always find you, Jamie.

When the babysitter rushed into my room, white-faced and in panic at the noise, she found me standing beside my bed holding my bedside lamp in my hand.

I didn’t know what in the world it was doing there, or why my feet were bleeding, or how the floor was littered with broken shards of glass. I glanced dumbly at the mirror, then back at the lamp. She gently took the lamp from my hands and laid it on my nightstand.

“What happened, Jamie?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you break the mirror?”

“I don’t know.”

“Were you dreaming?”

I rubbed my eyes. “I don’t know. I guess.” My feet were beginning to hurt from the glass I’d stepped in. The sole of my left foot was bleeding. “I want my dad.” Then I started to cry.

When I was forty, decades after my parents had divorced, the year my father was diagnosed with mid-stage Alzheimer’s and had begun to visibly deteriorate—still three years away from the events at Wild Fell—he asked me if I remembered the boy who had stolen my bike in the summer of 1970, the one who had been attacked by a swarm of wasps the next day and who had succumbed to the venom from thousands of stings three days later, dying in agony at the age of twelve.

I’d stared at my father blankly and told him,
No, I don’t remember anything like that happening that year, or ever.
And it was true: I had no such memory.

Privately I’d wondered, at the time, if the disease had already taken hold to the point that he was not only forgetting what had happened, but was also beginning to imagine things happening that never had. But of course I never said anything to him about those suspicions. I knew that what was coming for him was crueller than anything I could imagine in my worst nightmares, and I couldn’t bring myself to add to his terror by verbalizing my own fears about the long, dark tunnel of loss into which he was descending, taking me with him, and away from him, at the same time.

As for the little girl in the mirror, I would have no memory of her for more than thirty years, until I bought the house called Wild Fell on Blackmore Island.

“We must have moths,” Nurse Jackson said. “
Moths
, if you can believe it.”

She frowned, as though the incidence of the moths might somehow be perceived as a denigration of her nursing abilities, or worse, the quality of her care for her patients, in this case, my father. Nurse Jackson—whose first name was Ardelia—touched my father’s cardigan, fingering two small holes in the maroon cashmere sleeve. “Just
look
at his sweater. I never noticed this before.” She laid a light hand on my father’s arm and smiled with the beatitude I’d come to think of as her special gift, not just to her patients but also the universe. “Peter, what happened here? Your lovely sweater.” She turned to me and said, “You bought this sweater for him, didn’t you, Jam
ie? From Brooks Brothers. In New York.”

I nodded, my throat suddenly full. My suitcases were stacked just outside the doorway to his room. Their presence struck me like a reproach. But if it was one, I was reproaching myself. I was the one leaving him here in this place where the scrupulous standards of cleanliness of which the MacNeil Institute was justifiably proud couldn’t entirely eradicate the perpetual scent of sour urine and pre-made industrial hospital food. The rooms were painted in warm colours in a valiant attempt to offset the sense of loneliness and gloom that permeated the place.

“He told me once,” she said kindly. “He said you gave it to him for Christmas.”

“That’s right, I did. Five years ago. Before . . . well, before this.”

She nodded sympathetically, but not with excess sympathy. Ardelia Jackson believed in the value of living and loving in the present, as she never tired of telling relatives of her patients. She never proselytized, nor did she hector. But she was an adamant advocate for her patients. Nurse Jackson said she tried to see everything as a stage of life to be embraced. When I’d broken down in front of her once and wept openly for the loss of my father as I had known him, she reminded me that he was still in there and that he still felt—and needed—my love.

More than anything else, I needed to hear that, and, even more, believe it. When Ardelia Jackson said it, I believed it.

I pointed to the window, where three small white moths fluttered in the sunlight in front of the glass, obviously confused and trying to escape. “Aha! There are your culprits.” I walked over to the window and made to kill them with my hands, but Nurse Jackson laid her hand on my arm to stop me. She reached out and unlatched the window and the moths fluttered out of the room, vanishing around the edge of the building into the morning sunlight.

“Jamie, your father would hate that. He’s gentle about things like that. Even things like killing insects. He may not notice much most of the time, but he always seems to notice everything that has to do with any living thing. To him, they’re all God’s creatures. He told me that, too.”

“He’s always been like that,” I said. “He’s always been gentle. You’ve been good to him, Ardelia. I can’t tell you how much that’s meant to me.”

She winked. “I’m not supposed to have favourite patients, but I can’t help myself. Peter is special. He’s a wonderful gentleman. He always reminds me of my dad. Dad was sweet like Peter is now.”

Nurse Jackson had told me one evening that her own father had lost his battle with Alzheimer’s when she was a still a little girl. It gave her an affinity, she said, for sons and daughters of fathers suffering from the disease. Her nursing career, which was as much a vocation as a career, was a direct result of watching her mother endure his loss.

My father stared opaquely out the window at the three moths still circling in quivering, mindless flight.

The world in which he now spent most of his days and nights seemed to at least be a peaceful one, for which I tried to be grateful, even if “gratitude” to the merciless illness that had taken us away from each other—not quickly, as death would, but in excruciating increments of days, weeks, and months—was a hard go.

It had been painful enough to watch my father’s shame when he couldn’t remember my name. Worse still when he didn’t know me, even after I told him I was his son, Jamie. By the time my father was actively
afraid
of the bulky, forty-year-old man he didn’t recognize as his son—the one who spoke softly to him with filial familiarity, caressed his hand, tried to hug him, called him
Dad—
I realized I’d had an authentic glimpse of hell. The insidious devils that ran the place bore no resemblance to anything Biblical. Their sadism was far too subtle for mere religious mythology. They’d damned my father by siphoning away the memory of his life, taking care that he’d been aware enough to know it, and they’d damned me by forcing me to watch it happen.

The best years of my childhood had been after he and my mother divorced.

I had been ten. Everyone tiptoed around me as though my mother leaving us was supposed to be the most devastating thing imaginable, but after three solid years of increasingly escalated arguments, it was really more of a blessing. Her indifference to me had hurt less than her anger at him, which seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. On the rare occasions that my mother made me part of their marital psychodrama, it was as part of a rebuke to her husband.

“You
always
take his side,” she seethed. “Like when he brought that stupid turtle home. But you didn’t listen, and we know how
that
turned out. It’s like you’re married to him instead of me. Sometimes I think I should just go off and live by myself and let you two live your own lives together.”

My father always protested, of course, but after a while it must have seemed like an excellent idea, likely to both of them. In 1972, she did just that, and left.

I said I wanted to live with my father. Since my mother didn’t want me, for the sake of form or even spite, there was no fuss over custody. I simply stayed in our house with him and grew up there. At first, we were hesitant with each other, like two survivors of an explosion that had just levelled a city block; but in time, we both realized that our house was calm and quiet all of a sudden, the atmosphere detoxified and clear of the constant anticipation of hostility. Our spines relaxed, our jaws lost the tense set we hadn’t realized they’d adopted. We kept waiting for all of that to change for the worse, even for mourning to set in, but it never did. Since my mother was the one who initiated the separation, I could only gauge its effect on my father as the one who had been “abandoned” (a word I picked up from listening to my mother and her friends talking about women who had been left by their husbands—a word I assumed must be similarly applicable to men who had been left by their wives).

When my mother announced that she was moving to Vancouver to stay with her family “for a little while, till I get things sorted out,” I breathed a sigh of relief that it would likely be the end of the tense lunches and dinners in restaurants that had become our sole interaction on “her” day. I have no idea what she told her friends, but when neighbours and close friends of both my parents came over to check up on us (or, more accurately, me, the “abandoned” child), they were surprised to see me smiling and calm and happy in my father’s company, and under his care.

I overheard an exchange between my father and Mrs. Alban one evening when she’d come over to drop off a cake she’d baked for us. It hadn’t been my intention to eavesdrop, but when I heard my name, I paused on the stairs and crouched there, listening to what the adults were saying.

“Alice is a
gadder
, Peter. Some women are just like that,” Mrs. Alban said. I heard her sigh. “You’ll forgive me for speaking my mind. I don’t mean to impugn Alice, and I’ve always been fond of you both, but some women aren’t always made to be wives and mothers. I’m sure she gave it her best shot. How is Jamie doing?”

“I think he’s doing fine, Mrs. Alban. I think he misses his mother, but the two of us are doing well. Alice loves him, and I think Jamie knows that. Divorce is never easy on anyone,” he added diplomatically. “But we’re going to be okay. Alice, too, I suspect.”

“I don’t mean to intrude in a way that’s too personal,” Mrs. Alban said, “but while it’s unusual for the child to stay with the father rather than the mother, I think it’s probably a very good idea in this case.”

My father’s voice sounded stiff and formal all of a sudden. I could tell that Mrs. Alban had crossed a line without being aware of it. “Thank you, Mrs. Alban,” he said. “We think so, too.”

And that was that.

For his part, my father felt it was his duty to present both sides of the story to me, lest I harbour any ill will toward my mother later in life. He had never spoken ill of her in my presence, even when it had become obvious that divorce was inevitable. That was the point at which he stopped making excuses for her and simply let her words and actions speak for themselves. That was as judgemental of my mother as he ever got in front of me.

“Jamie,” he asked me one evening after she left, “are you angry at your mother?”

“No, Dad.”

“Are you angry at me? It’s okay if you are, you know. We can talk about it.”

“No, Dad.”

“You’re probably too young to understand what happened between your mother and I, but even if we don’t love each other the way we used to, we still love you. And that’s the important thing. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“I know, Dad. It’s okay.”

“Jamie, do you . . . do you, you know, want to see anybody about this?”

“Like who?”

“You know. Another grownup, maybe? Like a doctor?”

“No,” I repeated. “I’m not sick. I’m really okay.” And I really was okay, too. It was the last time my father suggested a psychiatrist.

Privately I
did
wonder if there was something wrong with me with regard to why I didn’t miss my mother more. I asked Hank about it once right after my mother left. Hank’s view was a pragmatic one, a pragmatism that belied the fact that she was only ten.

“It sucks that your mom left, Jamie,” she said kindly. “But you know, your dad is nicer than your mom. And he loves you a lot. At least you get to stay with him. You’ll get to do all kinds of cool stuff now, and never have to worry about your mom being mad at you for doing it. Also, I don’t think she really liked me that much, so I’m not sad she’s gone, either.”

Still, I worried. “Do you think it’s weird that I’m not really sad?”

She shrugged. “Nope. I think it’s weirder that your mom wanted to leave you guys. You have a nice house, and your dad is a nice person. As for me, my mom is a pain in the you-know-what. I wish she’d leave, too. I wouldn’t be sad if she did. Well, not
that
sad,” she qualified. “At least I’d be able to keep my hair short and let the stupid holes in my stupid ears grow over and never have to wear these
stupid
earrings ever again. And nobody would ever call me ‘Lucinda Jane’ again. I
hate
being a girl.”

“You’re not a girl to me,” I said loyally. “You’re just Hank.”

“Thanks, Jamie. You’re not a boy to me, either. You’re just . . .” She paused, thinking it over. “Well, just
you
.”

“Thanks, Hank.”

When I was thirteen, we left the Ottawa and moved to Toronto because my father got a better job. I missed Hank terribly. We wrote to each other every week and spoke on the phone sometimes late at night when the rates were low. Hank wasn’t allowed to rack up long-distance charges so I always called her. My father understood the importance of our bond and encouraged it.

At fourteen, I experienced a growth spurt. My body filled out with new muscle, yielding unfamiliar strength. All traces of the willowy androgyny of my childhood vanished behind a wall of sinew in the space of a year, and I grew five inches, topping out at a solid six-one.

For the first time in my fourteen years, I was the physical superior of all the boys I knew. There was no more bullying from anyone, and there was something in its place: complete equanimity.

My new height and weight caught the attention of the various coaches at my high school. I was encouraged to try out for sports—hockey, football, even wrestling. I resisted at first, of course. None of the experiences I’d had with boys my own age up to then had inclined me toward trust, let alone affection.

But at the coaches’ insistence, I tried out for all three. While I had no natural dexterity or ability in either hockey or football, neither the other boys on the team, nor the ones trying out seemed to find anything particularly unusual, let alone abuse-worthy, in my competing on their level. My new physicality seemed to be currency enough; they didn’t seem to sense anything different about me the way the boys back home in Ottawa had when I was younger and frailer. If my new physical imposition was my camouflage, it was a perfect illusion. It had erased any traces of who or what I had been. This new Jamie Browning could go anywhere, and did. I finally settled on wrestling. The sport suited my new strength and I responded to the rigours of the training regimen. Best of all, the sport was the perfect conduit for any pent-up aggression I had accumulated over the years. Even if no one I wrestled had any idea who Jamie Browning had been prior to this transformation, they felt the full force of it when I had them pinned under me on the mat.

After graduating from university I became an English teacher at a private school outside of Toronto. I loved teaching and took to it with a naturalness that surprised everyone who knew me, except my father who told me that he’d always envisioned me as a teacher of some kind.

I married a young woman named Ame Millbrook, with whom I’d fallen in love my final year at the University of Toronto. She had beautiful shoulder-length red hair and skin like the inside of a peony petal.

Ame had moved into the Knox College residence after three years of living with two roommates in an apartment on Palmerston Avenue, not far from the university, in the Annex. She had broken up with her boyfriend that summer and had wanted to make a complete break from her previous life while she finished up her history studies. After she received her B.A., she planned to take a year off, she said, to travel.