It Happened to Us

by François Houle

  Lori-Anne blushed.

  “Do you want us to take care of things for you?” she said.

  “No need,” he said. “We made plans a while back, after her first stroke, just in case. We realized we weren’t going to be around forever and we didn’t want you and Mathieu to be burdened, scrambling to get it all arranged. I just need to make a phone call.”

  “Guess she’ll be buried with the rest of the family.”

  Grandpa nodded. “There’s room for all of us there.”

  Lori-Anne glanced at her husband, and this time he was looking at her and she could see how overwhelmed he was.

  He must feel like his world is imploding, she thought, and there isn’t a thing he can do to stop it.

  “Going to get something to drink,” Mathieu said. “Anyone else want something?”

  “A bottle of water would be great,” Lori-Anne said.

  Once Mathieu had left the room, she said, “You’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do. Anything at all.”

  “I think Mathieu needs your help more than I do. I’ll be fine. But the boy, he’s been through a lot and I’ll be honest, I’m worried. And I know you are too, it’s written all over your face. Any luck with counselling?”

  Lori-Anne shook her head. “I mentioned it the one time and it became a fight,” she said. “He’s stubborn. Thinks he’ll get through it by himself, somehow. But I’m worried. Even more than before, if that’s possible. I don’t know what losing Grandma is going to do to him.”

  Grandpa nodded. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  “But you have your own loss to deal with.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Now I know where he gets it from.”

  “We are a proud bunch,” he said with a hint of a grin. “I’ll miss my Flore I have no doubt, but I’m more worried about Mathieu. I’ve never seen him like this.”

  “It’s like something was switched off inside of him.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  Mathieu came back and they fell silent. He handed Lori-Anne a bottle of water. She took a couple of sips.

  “When will you have the service?” she said.

  “I have to speak to the funeral director, but maybe Thursday. Give me a chance to let people know. She had a lot of friends at the community centre. Still volunteered once a week.”

  Lori-Anne looked at Grandma. “She was always thinking of others.”

  “She was,” Grandpa said. “They’ll all want to come and say goodbye.”

  “It’s getting late. I’m sure the nurses will be asking us to leave soon.” She turned to Mathieu. “You staying?”

  “A bit longer. Going to drive Grandpa home.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Lori-Anne kissed Grandpa on the cheek and left without kissing her husband.

  TWELVE

  July 2, 2012

  5:00 a.m.

  The five o’clock sun shone through the bedroom window, right into Mathieu’s face. He’d slept on Nadia’s bed, her stuffed animals helter-skelter around him and on the floor.

  He couldn’t remember falling asleep.

  Shortly after nine the nurses had asked them to leave so that Grandma could be looked after, which Mathieu assumed meant taken to the morgue. His grandfather had left without a fuss, and so had he, feeling small and misplaced. He and Grandpa had walked down the hospital corridor in silence, Mathieu wondering how his grandfather would cope on his own. He’d heard that when a couple had been married for as long as his grandparents had, when one of them went, the other followed shortly after, as if the surviving spouse couldn’t live without the other.

  He’d driven Grandpa home and made sure his grandfather settled in for the night before heading out. He dimly recalled making his way up the stairs to Nadia’s room. He’d probably opened her door like he did every night just to get a sense of her and had sat on her bed and then lay down.

  Mathieu pushed himself up, knocking a stuffed frog to the floor where it noiselessly came to rest beside a two-foot-long snake. Lori-Anne had always hated that snake, any snake for that matter, stuffed or real. She had tried to convince Nadia on several occasions that she should get rid of it, but Nadia had refused, finding it funny that her mom was afraid of a toy.

  “It’s not real, Mom. Get a grip,” Nadia would say.

  Mathieu had bought that snake in Picton, on the way home from their first camping trip. Nadia had been seven. She’d bugged them that all her friends went camping during the summer and that she was the only one who never had any camping stories to tell come the new school year, so Mathieu bought a tent, air mattresses, sleeping bags, and all the other gear he thought they needed, and they drove to Sandbanks. He’d researched campsites across Ontario and had read so many great comments about that campground. If the best campsite in the province turned out to be a horrible experience, then they could at least say they’d tried it and never go again.

  He managed to pack everything into his Honda Civic, the same one his daughter would die in years later, and off they’d gone. It drizzled on the way there, but as they got closer to the site the sky cleared and the temperature shot up ten degrees. Setting up camp took them almost two hours, and by late afternoon, pleased with their efforts, he and Lori-Anne cracked open a couple of drinks and toasted to their first family camping trip.

  That’s when they realized that Nadia was nowhere to be seen.

  They looked inside the tent, around the site, checked the outhouse. They asked other campers if they’d seen a seven-year-old girl, just under four feet tall, long blond hair and blue-grey eyes, wearing white shorts, a pink camisole and a pink baseball cap. No one had seen her. Other parents reassured them that she’d probably made friends—it was so easy when camping to make friends they all said—and that the kids were probably just exploring. It’s what kids did when camping.

  Forced smiles and stiff thank yous were all they could manage. The idea of losing her nauseated them. Only a few hours into their first camping trip and they were regretting it already. No one had offered to help. No one seemed concerned.

  They checked the restrooms and shower facilities. More outhouses. Finally, one camper pointed to an area where kids got together to play. They thanked him and ran, calling out her name a little too loudly.

  “Mommy! Daddy!” Nadia ran to them, grinning from ear to ear, brandishing a small field snake as if it were a prized trophy.

  Lori-Anne screamed—a scream that carried across the entire campground. The park rangers showed up a few minutes later to make sure no one was being mauled by a bear or some other wild animal. Bears were extremely rare in Sandbanks. Racoons, skunks, and snakes, however, were plentiful.

  Mathieu scooped the stuffed animals from the floor and put them on the bed, having no idea how Nadia used to arrange them.

  “Sorry, honey,” he said, “for messing up your bed.”

  Oh Daddy, don’t you know anything?

  He’d heard that plenty of times over the years. She would try to be angry with him, her hands on her hips and a scowl on her face because he’d messed up her stuffed animals, so he’d pick her up and throw her on the bed and tickle her. Her arms would flail and knock the animals all over the place, and then she’d try to be really angry with him but he’d tickle her even more and she would laugh harder and beg him to stop, please, please stop Daddy before I pee my pants, and he would, and then they would sit on the bed, her feet dangling over the edge.

  He was so happy at those times, never realizing that someday she would get older and wouldn’t want her dad to tickle her that way, wouldn’t want to spend time playing dolls with him or board games like Junior Monopoly or the Game of Life. No, he’d never thought that in a few short years she’d be a teenager and he’d be just Dad, not Daddy, and he wouldn’t mean as much to her but she would mean just as much to him.

  That had happened almost overnight, when she’d turned thirteen. His
little girl wasn’t so little anymore and she didn’t need him as much. He couldn’t get used to that. He’d always done so much with her and for her, and now she didn’t want him. He didn’t know when it was okay to do something for her or when to let her be. He seemed to get it wrong every time, and Nadia got angry with him no matter what.

  Every parent had to grind through the teenage years, knowing they wouldn’t last forever. With a little hope and luck, their teenager would turn out to be a beautiful, loving, and caring adult. Mathieu thought about the Nadia he would never know, the person she would have grown up to be.

  He would have loved to have known that person.

  Mathieu sat at her desk and powered up Nadia’s laptop. He was on autopilot, not really aware of what he was doing, drawn by Nadia’s presence which filled the air, thick and vibrant. In this room she had played with her Barbies, had Caitlin over for sleepovers, danced to music playing on the radio or iPod, taped posters on the walls of Jacob from Twilight and more recently one of Kurt Cobain.

  He clicked on the Internet Explorer icon and Facebook came up. Nadia had set it up so that it signed in automatically. Mathieu felt like a voyeur, but he couldn’t turn away. There were comments from yesterday, friends saying how much they missed her, how they wished she was still here, that it sucked that she had died.

  Yeah, it sucked big time.

  He navigated down her Facebook page and stopped when he found some sort of poem.

  Why do things hurt so much?

  Sometimes, at night, I think I can’t

  I’m so lonely amongst a thousand friends

  Who can’t help me get rid of the pain

  Why does he ignore me all the time

  When he knows I love him so much

  I feel like a fool

  But can’t stop myself no matter

  He looks at me but doesn’t see

  My heart beating so hard for him

  I run away to hide my tears

  Bury my pain in the shame of my feelings

  I hate being like this

  It turns my world into a dark place

  That just won’t see any light

  Things I used to love, I now hurt

  And can’t help doing it

  I’m ashamed of it

  But can’t stop myself

  Mathieu stared at the words. It wasn’t great writing, but it was honest—painfully honest. Nadia had been in love with some boy who hadn’t returned her love. Cliché, yes, but not for a fourteen-year-old. He understood that much. Friends, first crushes, were life and death at that age.

  This was a part of his daughter’s life he’d known nothing about. Had Lori-Anne? Is that why she’d wanted to drive Nadia to dance that day? If so, why hadn’t she shared that with him? Maybe he could have helped, somehow, offered a boy’s point of view. And why hadn’t Nadia talked to him? She used to tell him everything.

  Because you’re a dad, and dads don’t like their little girls to grow up and fall in love. When she’d been a child, of course it had been easy for her to confide in him. But at fourteen, on the cusp of womanhood?

  He looked at the poem again. Something about it bothered him, not the writing, but the posting. His hand touched the screen, his fingertips running over each word, desperate to reach into a past that was simply no longer reachable.

  Then he got it.

  The time-stamp—March 26, 2012, 4:46.

  Everything inside of him turned to mush and he struggled to breathe. He felt paralyzed, he felt anger rise like bile in the back of his throat, he felt like hurling the laptop across the room.

  But mostly he felt that the worst day of his life would never end.

  THIRTEEN

  July 2, 2012

  5:52 a.m.

  Lori-Anne returned from the bathroom but instead of getting back into bed, she stepped into the hallway, thinking she’d heard a noise. The door to Nadia’s room was ajar. She walked toward her daughter’s room, hesitated for a second, then pushed the door wide open.

  “Mathieu?”

  He sat at the little desk he’d built for Nadia about three years ago so she could do her homework in a quiet place instead of down in the kitchen where she was easily distracted. He was staring at the computer screen with wide and haunted eyes, which made her want to sneak back to her room and pretend nothing was happening.

  “Mathieu?”

  Lori-Anne closed her eyes. The weariness of it all drained her. It would be much easier to simply walk away. At some point, she needed to think of her sanity and well-being. Yes, her mother had told her to be patient, that Mathieu was a good man who was lost. But how long before she lost herself trying to save him?

  How long?

  “Mathieu?” she said again. Three months since her daughter’s death and Lori-Anne still couldn’t step into Nadia’s room. Maybe she was as messed up as her husband. Maybe she was the one who needed counselling. “Mathieu?”

  This time, he turned to look at her.

  “What are you doing? You’re shaking. What’s wrong?” She hoped she sounded concerned instead of annoyed.

  He waved her in.

  “Just tell me,” she said.

  “Christ, Lori-Anne,” he said. “You still won’t come into her room.”

  “Never mind,” she said. “Just tell me what’s got you so freaked out.”

  He looked back at the computer screen, and Lori-Anne thought he wasn’t going to tell her.

  “D’you know what she was doing in the car that day?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The day of the accident.”

  “I get that,” she said. “But what are you talking about? I was trying to talk to her, get her to open up.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “Did she ever?” Lori-Anne said. “You know she was difficult.”

  “So you talked and she listened but said nothing.”

  Lori-Anne rolled her eyes. “Something like that.”

  “Was she on her phone?”

  “No, she wasn’t talking to anyone. Like I said, I was trying to get her to talk.”

  “Yeah, but was she texting?”

  “Yes, and it was annoying me,” she said. “I wanted her to tell me what was going on. And I was trying to keep my eyes on the road.”

  Mathieu made a snorting sound. “Little good that did.”

  “Fuck you, Mathieu,” she said. “I’m so damn tired of you blaming me for that accident. It happened. Could have been you instead of me. It could have happened to anyone. It just so happens that it happened to us. Don’t you think I have to live with this my entire life now? Don’t you think I replay the accident every day, wishing I’d done something different, left a few minutes earlier or later, taken a different route, stopped for gas, so things could have ended differently? But you know what? I can’t change the past. And neither can you. I know you blame me but no amount of blame will change anything.”

  He said nothing.

  “You need to let that go,” she said. “Or d’you enjoy having us like this? Is that it? You like the way our marriage is? You like being miserable all the time? You like drowning in self-pity? You like making me feel guilty?”

  Mathieu opened his mouth to say something, and then closed it.

  “Talk to me,” she said. “Why can’t you just talk to me? Quit shutting me out and talk to me. I’m willing to get counselling for us so we can work through this. Don’t you want things to get better?”

  “What if they can’t?”

  “We have to try.”

  “But . . .” He turned to the computer screen again.

  “What’s so interesting on that laptop?” she said. “Just tell me.”

  “You have to see this. Come here.”

  Lori-Anne let out a heavy sigh. She didn’t have the energy to keep fighting, so she finally crossed the imaginary line that had kept her out of her daughter’s room all these
months.

  And she felt it instantly—the closeness to their daughter. Nadia’s presence assaulted Lori-Anne, coming from everywhere: the curtains, the bedspread, the clothes in her closet, the books on the bookshelf, the iPod on the night table, the laptop on the desk.

  Nadia was gone but her room emanated this overwhelming aura. In here, Nadia was still alive.

  This wasn’t good. No wonder Mathieu couldn’t let go, no wonder he spent so much time here. The room had to be cleaned. No, more than that. It needed a thorough cleansing. But it felt sacrilegious to erase the last reminder of their daughter. Besides, Mathieu would never allow it. If she went behind his back, it would be the end of their marriage.

  Her shoulders sagged. She didn’t want to fight anymore. It drained her and didn’t solve a thing. All she wanted was to fall into his arms, feel the warmth of him, smell his scent, and connect with him like they used to.

  But did he want her? She thought of the way he blew up at her all the time, his eyes stormy and full of ire, making her step back as if she’d been scorched. That wasn’t the man who had vowed to love her forever.

  “What do you need me to see so bad?” she said and came closer to him.

  “This,” he said, pointing at the screen.

  Lori-Anne looked at what appeared to be some sort of poem or song, and shrugged. “So?”

  “This is Nadia’s Facebook page.”

  She looked a little closer. “And?”

  “Did you read it?”

  “Well, no,” she said. “What are you getting at? So she wrote something on her Facebook page. All the kids do that. Probably doesn’t mean anything to us.”

  “She was in love, did you know that?”

  “In . . . love?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He read the poem aloud to her.

  “Okay,” she said. “She was a teenager. They fall in love by the minute.”

  “Maybe so,” he said. “Look at the posting time.”

  “Oh my God! No wonder she didn’t want to give me her phone. She was uploading this to her Facebook when it happened.” A chill ran through her. “I . . . can’t believe this.”