The Erratics

by Vicki Laveau-Harvie

  Come later, he whispers. Later.

  When you are dead? I say silently. I don’t think so.

  Out loud I say, Ok, Dad. It’s all right.

  I call my sister. She says, Why? Why would you go to see them? They hate us. They don’t want to see us. We can’t go. It’s dangerous. There’s a rifle and who knows what all.

  She is still smarting from the fall-out of a phone call we made some months before to the Mounted Police, who have jurisdiction over the foothills, in the face of dead silence from the property on the hill where our parents are holed up.

  We decided they were dead, or dying and just lying there suffering and, with no family or friends we felt could go check for us, we sent in the cavalry.

  The phone call my sister got from a nice young officer, who tried to cushion what he had to say the best way he could, was a zenith of bewilderment and hurt for her, and she is not going to forget it.

  He said, I saw both your parents. Your mother came to the door and explained that they still drive, that they have food and medicine and doctors and dentists on speed-dial, neighbours at their beck and call. I insisted on seeing your father. I was allowed to step inside. Your father waved from his chair. The only thing he said was, and here the young Mountie apologised, I am sorry to have to relay this to you but your father’s only spoken words were: those girls are just after the money.

  My sister thanked him politely and dialled directory assistance to get the number for my father’s sole surviving sibling. She phoned him and his wife, people with whom we had had no contact for years. She asked if it was possible that my father’s pronouncement was true, that she was venal and horrible and completely unaware of her own motives.

  Our uncle said, I have never seen anything to indicate that could be true of you, or your sister. Your parents, however, that fits like a glove.

  I tell my children I will be away for a couple of weeks. My son is only aware of his grandparents as an elusive yet forbidding shadow following his mother around, but my daughter thinks I am a fool. She has had two close encounters with my mother and cannot believe anyone would care what happens to her.

  I can hardly explain to my children that I am doing this in application of my principle of pre-emptive karma. I can’t explain because I would need to tell them that this principle is also what guides my parenting, and this would lead to discussion.

  You sometimes see photos of surfers or rock stars with tattoos that say things like ‘No Regrets’, and you imagine this is an exhortation to live fully, even or especially to excess, in contravention of all healthy living guidelines.

  I suspect it is not that simple, that words are slipperier than that. I suspect that on a corner of my soul is a tattoo saying ‘no regrets’, all lower case size 12 Old Bookman font, and it means not excess but restraint.

  It means always try to do the decent thing, the rational thing, the selfless thing, the boring thing, because then you won’t have to beat yourself up with guilt until your early stress-induced death. Or, if my sister is right, all through your next existences as lower life forms paying for your sins, as a slug or maybe a bat if you are lucky.

  Do nothing you know you will live to regret.

  The most supportive person I run into in Australia is a disembodied voice when I phone HR at my workplace. She tells me she totally gets what I am explaining to her, and arranges something called compassionate leave for me, adding that I should stay as long as it takes and she’ll handle things for me on this end.

  Bless you, I say. Yeah, she sighs. Been there, done that.

  I call my mother. She has become used to me phoning and sometimes answers if she wants to complain about the parlous state of the roof, the plumbing, the flooring; about the impossibility of getting a tradesman to travel ‘way out there’, when ‘way out there’ is not exactly several days’ coach travel through hostile Indian country from the nearest foothill towns, or even from Calgary. I am suspicious and will travel with phone numbers for every social service available in Southern Alberta, for Meals on Wheels and Volunteer Drivers, determined to unleash the hounds of homecare on their stubborn old behinds if I find them living like Norman Bates.

  My mother says, You can’t come here. I reply, with unbecoming childishness, You can’t stop me. She tries another tack.

  You can’t stay here, she says. You’ll just make work for me.

  I don’t plan to, I tell her. I’ll stay somewhere else, a hotel. I’ll come out to see you. I’ll knock on the door. You can make me a cup of coffee. Or not, if that’s too big an ask. We can go into town for a coffee. Or not, as you wish. Bottom line, you can open the door or not, but I will knock.

  Why, she cries. Why would you do this to us? Why would you come here?

  I hang up and answer the questions in my mind. Because you are my parents, more’s the pity, and because I can.

  I call my aunt and uncle. I remember their kindness to my sister after the RCMP intervention fiasco, and I would like to see them. They veto my hotel idea. They will fetch me at the airport, I will stay with them and they will drive me out to see my parents whenever I want. They act like family. They are family. I manage to stammer my thanks.

  I stop in Vancouver overnight with my sister and her partner. My sister is humming like a transformer with something I take for anger at my deciding to do what I am doing. I try to explain that this is what I need to do, that she has no need to participate in what I’ve decided; that over the years she has made more attempts than I have to reach out and connect; that she has been consistently beaten back when she has tried. This is my go at it, I explain, and it’s a one-off.

  I completely misread her distress. I think she is hurt because I am making a decision without consulting her; I think she will get over it. A couple of years later, her partner will tell me that my sister packed a bag to go with me to see our parents and stowed it in the back of the boot of her car, that she made a reservation to fly with me, to protect me. All the way to the airport she wrestled with herself, breathing deeply and steeling herself to do this thing, to go with me, but when at the drop-off point her partner took my bag out of the boot and looked enquiringly at her, my sister couldn’t do it. She shook her head, no, burst into tears and hugged me like I was going to war and she might never see me again. That is what she believed.

  I saw nothing of this, understood none of this. I thought she was simply overwrought. She thought I was a dead woman walking.

  My uncle would have similar reservations about what I was doing. They weren’t actually wrong, as it turned out.

  I should have been more cautious.

  At the airport in Calgary, as I retrieve my bag from the carousel, I see my aunt and uncle from a distance, looking as they did decades ago except for nice silver hair on my aunt and abundant snow-white hair on my uncle. They are holding hands and peering endearingly into the faces of all the middle-aged women streaming by them, regardless of height and ethnicity, and consulting each other about whether maybe that one over there could be me.

  I can’t have changed that much, I call out to them just as they see me coming. We hurry forward towards each other and embrace like Michelin men in our big cold-weather coats.

  Chapter 12

  Leaving the airport, I ride in the passenger seat of my uncle’s big car. We glide miles and miles south on the Deerfoot Trail, prairie on our left to the east and the city of Calgary on our right, like lichen spreading on the nascent foothills and a bouquet of slim skyscrapers planted in the middle of it, near the river. We stop somewhere wood-panelled and leather-boothed for a bowl of soup because I insist on taking them out to lunch, the least I can do.

  I try to keep their grandchildren straight as we talk about their family, so many of them, and a dozen or more great-grandchildren. All I have to hang this information on are the names of my three cousins, and a vague memory of how they looked as children. I wouldn’t know them in the street.

  We’re like the king and the queen, my uncle s
ays, every time we see any of them, whenever they visit. Like the king and the queen. They smile at the fullness of their life: love and problems, success and loss, pride and a hefty measure of grief. A well-worn life fully lived, perspectives widening with each new baby, blossoming like one of those paper flower buds that unfold into unexpected beauty when you plunge them into water.

  In their apartment, I look out the tall windows in the breakfast nook. It is only mid-afternoon and it is only late September, but the sky is steely with gunmetal grey clouds and the wind has stripped all but a few luminous yellow leaves from the aspen in the park across the street. The slender tree trunks stand dark and mournful, the branches swaying like the arms of the bereaved on hearing the news. There is a dusting of snow on the lower slopes of the Rockies in the distance.

  I have to phone my parents and I feel nothing but dread.

  My aunt and uncle go discreetly into their bedroom while I phone. My mother picks up, not surprised because I have given ample notice of my arrival. She asks where I am staying.

  I was so hoping she wouldn’t. For a second I consider lying, telling her I am in a hotel. I could lie, I’ve had practice, but you know what? I am suddenly too tired to be inventive, too gutted by considering how my parents have lived and how others have. I’m a battery with no juice, and frankly I just don’t give a damn.

  So I tell her. I’m not quite prepared for the force of the reaction. Her voice comes burning white-hot down the phone lines. I peer out the window, looking toward the southwest for a mushroom cloud. You get out of there right now, young lady, she says. You come out here right now. You can’t stay there, with those people.

  Why not, I say. They’re family. They offered. You didn’t. You expressly forbade me to entertain any idea of staying with you.

  She hangs up.

  My uncle and aunt break cover and I fill them in. The phone rings again and my uncle’s eyebrows ask if I want to take the call. I don’t but I pick up anyhow.

  They leave the room again. Down the line, my mother rants some more and hangs up again. I go sit on a big footstool and my aunt and uncle come back out and sit in armchairs and we all look at each other.

  The next time the phone rings, I leap up and motion at them to stay please. This is their living room. This is embarrassing.

  But this time it is my father’s voice I hear, tight and colourless. He says, You have to come out here tonight.

  No, Dad, I don’t. Mum and I have talked about this, about me not staying with you, about me not making work for her. I just want a little visit. We’ve talked about this.

  Just stay here tonight, he says. This is causing so much trouble.

  My aunt and uncle and I sit silently for a while and I can feel that there is a whole lot that they would like to say, a backlog that they are too kind to air, a bit more than sixty-eight years of unpleasantness since the day my parents wed and my uncle, as best man, felt in his pocket for the rings and realised that he had put them on the table in the vestry of the church and ran back to get them, a delay of maybe thirty seconds in the proceedings and everybody smiling, nobody caring at all. Except my mother, who hissed that he had ruined her wedding, that she would never forgive him, and never speak to him again.

  Your mother cuts a wide swathe of misery where she passes, my uncle says as he picks up his car keys.

  My uncle has me by the hand and it is a good thing because my brain is busy wondering if I am disassociating or hallucinating, and what exactly the difference is. He has driven me here, south down the highway from McKenzie Towne where he lives, the car slowing to turn right onto Rural Route Two with the metal mail boxes on the corner, and slowing more with each mile until we are crawling into the drive that leads to this house.

  Your car is tired, I said, as we pulled up, to lighten the mood. It’s carried me around a lot today. He patted the dashboard. It’s not that, he said. We’re good for a few miles yet. The car just doesn’t really want to bring you here, and neither do I.

  Hello stranger, my mother says to my uncle as she swings open one half of the big wooden cathedral door that gives directly onto her great room, onto the grand piano, the vaulted ceiling, the chandelier and the fainting couch, the wide, wide picture window looking west to the mountains.

  To me she says nothing. She looks through me. I calculate that I haven’t seen her for eighteen years. I imagine a series of self-help books written by my mother for other parents for whom any child is a problem child. Book One: How to Foster a Healthy Sense of Self in your Children (Not!). Chapter One: Why would you? Look right through them. That should fix them for a while.

  You’re letting the cold in, my mother says. I take my little bag from my uncle. It weighs nothing as my aunt has insisted that I take only the bare essentials for staying one night and that tomorrow they are, as she put it, bringing me back to stay my two remaining nights with them. My uncle pats me. Tomorrow, he says, and turns back to the car.

  My father is sitting in a wing chair. He looks caved in, huddled. He hasn’t moved or spoken, but as I come toward him, something flickers in his eyes. I’d like to think that it is hope, or love, or happiness. Maybe it’s just the last spit of life from an ember as it dies in the fire, leaving ashes to crumble. I re-evaluate and decide that perhaps Mum had cause to write to me, and that he is dying.

  But then she must be dying too. They are both as thin as garden rakes. Scarecrows look better. I blink in the dim light, realising that if I saw them in the street, I would call an ambulance for my father without recognising him, or this gaunt and glowering witch dressed in layers of expensive dark viyella and sporting a shockingly jet-black bob, who dogs my steps as I approach my father. She used to be a big woman.

  My father rises painfully and I put my arms around him, feeling only bone.

  Supper is on the stove. I put my things where I’m told and go to the kitchen to try to help. My mother disappears and when I venture into the depths of the house to find her, to tell her that the water has boiled away in the pot with the asparagus and that I have turned the flame off under it, she surges silently from a dark doorway and pushes me with both hands, one sharp shove of surprising force that sends me into the wall. I bang my shoulder blade against the thermostat and refuse to wince. Ruined, she thunders. Your fault. Ruined.

  I stand for a few moments after she disappears down the hall, shying away from the understanding that burst upon me when she shoved, an utter, blinding certainty: this is how my father is going to die.

  One day soon, he will open the door to the staircase leading to the lower level of the house. He will be going to see to the furnace or feed the cat, beginning to negotiate the steps with caution, and she will push. He will die. I see no way to stop this.

  After dinner, as my mother cleans up, refusing offers of help, my father beckons to me furtively. I follow him into a sitting room where he pulls a pile of photos from a drawer, pictures of my children, his grandchildren, that I have sent over the years.

  You should take these back, he says. They’ll be lost if you leave them here. Put them in your bag.

  I do as he asks and when I come back to sit with him, he tells me a story about his war years. My father wanted to be a pilot but he had astigmatism and rules were rules. He remained a flight engineer and never flew officially, even though he says he flew rings around the guys with 20-20 vision who went to fight the Battle of Britain and never came home.

  Did I ever tell you about the time, he begins as I remember he always used to, when I was flying with those crazy Australians who were training here? We were stationed east of here, on the base at Midnapore. I was up one day with this mad Australian, and he thought he was the cat’s pyjamas. He thought it would be a lark to land in a farmer’s field, nice and flat, and go in and have a cup of tea with the farmer. No problem with the landing, although the farmer wasn’t giving anybody tea after that stunt.

  This Aussie still thought he was pretty smart but he changed his tune when we realised there
wasn’t the distance to take off again, no way to get up to speed and lift off, even revving like the very devil was on our tail. Which he would be if we couldn’t get this plane back in the air.

  My father is looking far away, back in a moment when life was excitement and danger and possibilities, and he was coming to grips with whatever was needed. He tells me how he measured and calculated, how they removed some gear from the little plane to make it lighter, how he recalculated and measured again and came up with something. If they tethered the plane to a rock formation jutting out of the ground at the very end of the field; if they tied it solidly to that rock and the farmer stood by with his axe while my father and the Australian in the plane pulled out all the stops, revving full throttle; if the farmer then severed the ropes in one go with his axe, there was an even chance that the pent-up thrust would propel this little training plane forward through the wheat stubble and upward. There was a fifty per cent chance it wouldn’t work and that they would crash through the fences at the end of the field, down the ravine on the other side and explode.

  The Australian said, We’re dead anyhow if we don’t get this thing back, aren’t we, Jimbo, and off they went.

  It worked. They catapulted themselves out of the harvested field and into the blue, whooping and swooping back down to wave at the farmer and give him a thumbs up, extremely good physics calculations from my father and seriously flawed common sense and massive cojones on the part of the Australian contributing to them living to see another day.

  My father sits, smiling faintly, looking at his hands. I wonder if he is thinking, as I am, that he has one miraculous escape in his past. I wonder if he is, as I am, imagining what the odds are of a second one; if there is the fuel to do it again.