by Michael Rowe
“Remember what you said,” I teased her. “If it doesn’t work out, I can just turn around and go home.”
All that was left was for me to close up my dad’s house, pack, and leave. I’d briefly thought of selling it, but it was paid up and I favoured the idea of having it to come home to when I visited.
First, though, I had to see him and ask his blessing on my departure, or his forgiveness, even if I knew he couldn’t rightly give it. And yet, still, here I was in his room, my suitcases stacked in the hall, trying to say goodbye.
I knelt down next to my father’s wheelchair and took his hand in mine. It felt as delicate and dry as a bird’s claw. The skin seemed almost translucent, pale veins rising like frozen blue streams in the midst of snow.
“Dad, can you hear me? You know I’m here. I know you know.” I leaned my cheek against his shoulder, feeling the soft red cashmere against my skin. Even in this awful place, with all its olfactory assaults, I still smelled the sweet scent of my father on the sweater. “Daddy? It’s me, Jamie. It’s your son. I’m going away for a little while. I’ll be back soon to see you, I promise. I swear it. I’m going to go fix up a house. I’m going to turn it into a guesthouse. Maybe you can come and stay with me once it’s done.” I winced. I hated the sound of my own lie, and I hated how quickly it had come to me. It served to underscore how far away my father was, that I could say almost anything to him and not elicit a reaction.
At that exact moment, I missed the entirety of Peter Browning so much that I felt my heart would shatter from the sheer pressure of the loss.
My father remained silent, his eyes fixed on the window out of which the moths had once flown. In the soft light, he looked younger than his seventy-five years. The disease hadn’t robbed him of the aspect of benevolence that was as germane to his face as the planes of skin and bone. While many of the patients at the MacNeil Institute habitually wore looks of confusion, or vacancy, or terror, my father had acquired the beatific patina of an ancient saint in a nineteenth-century Spanish fresco.
“Ah, Jesus,” I said. “I feel guilty about leaving. Really, really guilty.”
“I know you do,” Nurse Jackson said. “I understand that. But you shouldn’t. He’d want you to live. And you’ll be back for regular visits. We’ll stay in touch. I’ll take good care of your Dad, I promise.”
“Do you think he knows I’m going away?”
Nurse Jackson frowned at me. She had a remarkable frown, one that made me feel like I was a bad five-year-old who wasn’t paying attention.
“Stop saying you’re ‘going away,’ Jamie,” she said crisply. “If you keep saying it, it’ll become real to you, and you’ll be as lost as your father, in your own way. You’re not ‘going away’ from him. You bought a cottage on an island up north. Think of it that way. You’re going to make it into something. You’re not leaving home. You’ll be back. Your home is right here, in your father’s heart. You’re moving to a different spot on that long thread connecting you.”
“The house is pretty big to be a called a cottage.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, more grateful to her for her blessing in lieu of my father’s than I trusted myself able to express. “A white elephant, more likely. I probably should have used the insurance money from my accident on something else. Probably too good to be true.”
“Oh, pish-tosh.” Nurse Jackson waved away my words with a flick of her plump, soft hands. “It’ll be an adventure. If your father weren’t there, he’d be in that car with you. Where is it again? The town, I mean? I used to have family up in County Grey.”
“Alvina.”
“Hmmm, don’t know it. Not that that means anything. I never get away from here. Well, not nearly enough, anyway.”
I leaned down and kissed my father’s cheek. “Goodbye, Dad. I’ll see you very soon. I promise. I’ll come back to see you in a few weeks. I’ll bring pictures of the house for you to see, after we’ve cleaned it up. It’ll be so beautiful, you’ll see. You’ll be proud of me.”
“He’s already proud of you, Jamie,” Nurse Jackson said. “You know he is. Now, you go and do your work. Life is for the living. It’s what your dad would want—does want,” she corrected herself. “Does want.”
“Thank you, Ardelia.” I handed her a piece of paper. “You already have my cell phone number. I’ll have the phone with me. My email address will be the same, obviously. But in case anything happens, or if you can’t get through, here’s the number of the real estate agency in Alvina and their address. They’ll be able to get in touch with me in case Dad . . . well, in case of any sort of emergency.”
Impulsively, I reached for Nurse Jackson and kissed her on the cheek. Then I hugged her. When I stepped shyly away, she took both of my hands in hers, as gently as I had just taken my father’s.
“You’re a good man, Jamie Browning,” she said tenderly. “You’re a good boy. You’re a good son. Your father is a lucky man. You just go on.” She let go of one of my hands and reached for my father’s. She held both of our hands, joining us through the medium of her warm presence. “We’ll be fine.”
“I’m the lucky one,” I said thickly. “To have him. I always was. Goodbye, Ardelia, and thank you again. I’ll be in touch as soon as I get settled.”
I walked out of my father’s room without turning back.
In the hallway, I picked up my suitcases, which seemed much heavier all of a sudden, and carried them down the long corridor to the locked door that would take me out to the foyer, pausing for a moment while the nurse on the other side of the door buzzed it open, unlocking it, then buzzed it closed again, locking my father’s world behind me.
Chapter Three
THE ROAD TO WILD FELL
I drove north in my father’s boxy Volvo station wagon along a winding sweep of highway that rose and fell as the city faded from sight, replaced by great stretches of highway bordered on either side by a thick green phalanx of spruce pine bracketing occasional glimpses of open fields and rolling farmland. Highway 400, connecting Toronto to Barrie in a two-hour stretch of uninspiring blacktop, abruptly became a wasteland of strip malls and fast-food joints as we approached the city. Past Barrie, I continued north along the west of Georgian Bay, passing Orillia and Midland before continuing to Parry Sound. Then, still farther north. As the 400 became Highway 69, the vista became spectacular.
I’d spent the two-and-a-half-hour drive in a deep, gloomy guilt over having left my father at MacNeil, but the sudden burst of jagged beauty outside shocked me out of my melancholia. I pressed the button that rolled down the Volvo’s windows and let the wild northern air surge inside the car, clearing my head and snapping me completely out of my blue funk.
The city I’d left behind had been smothered in a sullen layer of foul brown smog. By contrast, the air rushing past the car windows was almost savage in its lucidity and I could smell the bright cold of Georgian Bay. The terrain itself had been formed from battered ice age granite rock that had been left rounded and smooth by the passage of millennia, forming islands studded with the ubiquitous windswept white pine. From the shoreline, as seen through dense patches of maple, juniper, and birch, the water was impossibly bright, reflecting the argentite sky. I made a right turn off the highway at the outer limits of the town of Adelphi, still fifty kilometres from Alvina. On the side of the road, sunbursts of goldenrod asserted themselves amidst patches of pussy willows and new-growth cedar as the newer highway gave way to the interconnected web of town roads that had bound these rural communities one to the other for a hundred years or more.
The temperature outside gradually dropped from refreshing to chilling as I drove deeper into the countryside, and I rolled the window back up.
The topography also grew bleaker—was that really the word, though? Bleak? Perhaps stark was a better word, because while the dull green of southern Ontario had given way to the craggy granite vistas made famous by the “Group of Seven
” artists, the outlook from the windows of the car was far from unappealing.
In truth, I felt the first genuine flutter of exhilaration, even excitement, since buying the house on Devil’s Lake I had yet to even see.
Even more, I had a preposterous anticipatory notion of familiarity, even ownership, as though the terrain outside the window stirred some memory from my childhood of time spent in one of these towns along the shore. But I knew this to be false: I’d never been here before, though I had seen paintings of these scenes in various art galleries over the years. Also, before buying the house, I’d Googled the town of Alvina, and Georgian Bay in general. There was no shortage of photographs of the region online, which was likely one of the reasons I’d felt foolishly comfortable defying logic and practicality for the first time in my life and buying Wild Fell without actually visiting it.
Once the real estate agent, Mrs. Velnette Fowler—she had actually insisted on the marital honorific, making the point twice—had been convinced of the sincerity of my inquiry, she had emailed me impressive photographs of the house that had not been included in the advertisement of the listing. They hinted at high ceilings and dark floors, a massive stone fireplace in the centre of what appeared to be the formal living room, still another in the slightly smaller dining room. Inside the house, a hand-carved mahogany circular staircase connected the first and second floors, leading to similarly proportioned rooms upstairs.
Included in the price were the tiny bit of rocky beach on the mainland across from the island and a dock of some sort, apparently constructed by order of the family in England in advance of the sale of the property, from which to launch a small motorboat to get back and forth.
To wit, Wild Fell was, in actual point of fact, far more than a mere “summer cottage.” It was a seventeen-room mansion, built with stone that had been locally mined. The same stone had been used to construct the wide steps that led up to the veranda. According to Mrs. Fowler, Wild Fell had been one of the finest houses in three counties, luxurious even by the standards of luxurious houses of the day.
“The gardens,” she said. “The gardens were famous. Mrs. Blackmore had more than five hundred varieties of roses in her garden. One variety was the ‘black rose’ that had been cut and transplanted from the bush that Mary, Queen of Scots slept under, the night before her execution.”
“Mary Queen of Scots?”
“Nothing was too good for the Blackmore family,” Mrs. Fowler said grandly. At that moment she sounded less like a real estate agent and more like a tour guide, or proud servant identifying with the family to whom she’d offered her fealty. “The house was built between 1823 and 1831 at enormous cost. It had stained glass windows, the best brocade drapes. Oh, and wallpaper all the way from England. My goodness, it was beautiful. You can see old pictures of it at the historical society. But most of it is still there, except for several pieces of furniture that the family in England insisted we try to sell. But the house is more or less intact. And it is just glorious.”
“Like Mary Queen of Scots’ rosebush,” I said dryly, trying to bring the conversation out of the realm of her gushing. “I find it hard to believe this is all for sale at the price quoted. Is there any possibility there was a mistake?”
There was a pause on the other end of the line, as though I’d offended her, either by my glibness, or by an emphasis on practical matters, like the price. I had dealt with real estate agents in the city, and Mrs. Fowler wasn’t like anyone I had ever met. “Mr. Browning, I don’t make mistakes,” she said. “And while I’m delighted that you find the price reasonable, I must in fairness advise you that it is still not inconsiderable, especially for a house of its size that will require new plumbing and new central heating at some point.”
“Now you sound like you’re trying to dissuade me, Mrs. Fowler.”
“Not at all. I just don’t want you to be under any illusions that this is some fire sale wreck. Houses like this one rarely come on the market. I myself would have preferred to offer it for a much higher price, but the family in England insisted that they wanted a fast sale.” She sighed. “It’s a landmark, and in excellent repair. Frankly, you’re the first inquiry, but I expect more of them by this evening, and I expect the house to be sold in a day or so.” A cunning note entered her voice. “Two, probably. Tops. There will likely be a feeding frenzy. And it will go to whoever gets there first. Believe me when I tell you, this is a once-in-a-lifetime deal. The family in England wants it gone quickly.”
I felt my heart quicken. “Has anyone seen it yet? I mean, potential buyers?”
“As I said, you’re the first, Mr. Browning. But when houses like this come up, rich buyers snap them up. Many do so without even seeing the house. We have all the inspection reports on file for anyone to check out. But it won’t be on the market long, I guarantee that.”
Later, it had occurred to me that she had exaggerated the expected “feeding frenzy,” but I asked her to fax over the inspection reports immediately and, flush with the reckless power of my new money, I had called the bank and arranged the transfer of funds. I think even Mrs. Fowler was shocked, but she went into shark realtor mode, all traces of her gushing about wallpaper and rosebushes immediately disappearing behind a volley of figures and process. Less than two days later, the house was mine. That night I promptly got drunk on Jack and Coke, but I wasn’t at all sure if I was celebrating my new purchase or processing shock at my foolishness. I’d briefly thought of cancelling the sale, but I realized there wasn’t likely any legal basis for it. I had paid cash for the house and I’d signed the papers.
Besides, it felt giddily, ridiculously freeing to make such an absurd purchase. But as time went by, I’d not experienced anything like buyer’s remorse, or even anxiety, just a sense of ineffable rightness, a rightness I still felt the need to run by Hank to make sure I wasn’t actually in the throes of some sort of insanity brought about by my action.
The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.
But at that moment, driving along the weathered, dusty rural roads, half an hour from Devil’s Lake, all I felt was that somehow I was coming home.
The thought comforted me as the tiny bullets of gravel spat and ground beneath the wheels of the Volvo and the stark landscape of blue water and granite urged me farther north.
I arrived in Alvina just before dusk under a silver-grey sky layered with a thick scud of topaz-coloured clouds fat with the promise of rain.
The town itself was more or less indistinguishable from all the other towns I had passed through once I had turned off the main highway, except that Alvina looked like it might have been captured in a sepia photograph from another time. It wasn’t that it seemed rundown—in fact, far from it. Main Street was smooth under the wheels, and there were boxes of geraniums in stone urns lining the wide sidewalks in between the wrought iron lampposts. Main Street ran through the store-fronted length of what appeared to be the town’s old-fashioned commercial district. Several of the storefronts had awnings, old ones with dark pine beams supporting them. Their condition—worn and faded, but not tattered—somehow suggested that they were a regular fixture on the street, not something laid out for the tourists and summer people who thus far seemed indistinguishable one from the other as they meandered along the street, dressed for fall in jeans and flannel. There was a sense of density on each side of Main Street, and I was aware of narrower, winding streets like breakaway arteries lined with smaller commercial buildings, and beyond that, distant lawns and houses. The trees along those streets were old-growth deciduous—maple and elm trees that were nearly pyrotechnic in their sourball-coloured autumnal glory.
I found Fowler Real Estate easily enough, off Main Street and three blocks south of the Alvina United Church, high on the hill brow above the town. The office was nestled in a cluster of buildings that looked as though they had been built in the 1940s, brick and clapboard storefronts and office buildings that bore the scars o
f decades of Canadian winters in a place where the glacial wind and snow off the bay was cruelly humbling to everything in its path.
I parked the car in front of the agency and stepped out. A damp wind was blowing in from the direction of Devil’s Lake. I shivered and opened the car door again to retrieve my maroon nylon windbreaker.
From somewhere in the back of the car, two large white moths rose jerkily into the air, then fluttered out the open door. They hovered for a moment directly in my sightlines, white on white, hard to see in the grey afternoon light, vanishing above my head, carried on the freshening breeze.
I reasoned that they must have been hiding in the folds of my clothes or on the side of my suitcases ever since MacNeil, a thought that faintly revolted me. I peered into the car in case there were any more hiding under the seats or on the floor, but there seemed to be none nestled there among the suitcases and the various items of clothing that had not been safely stowed in the back.
Reflexively I brushed my clothes off before putting on the windbreaker. Nurse Jackson had been correct; they had a moth problem at the home. My father’s face rose in my mind and I winced at the sudden pang of guilt. I pushed it firmly down, promising myself—and him, I suppose—that I would call Nurse Jackson as soon as I arrived at Wild Fell and ask her to give my father a hug for me.
The windows of Fowler Real Estate were plastered with printed advertisements for listings, mostly cottages for sale, some for rent. There was a smattering of unprepossessing year-round residential properties for sale, as well. Most were, frankly, ugly. They were clearly intended for families, or perhaps retirees who had chosen to live up north full time. It was difficult to picture any of the photographs Mrs. Fowler had sent me of Wild Fell ever having been placed here among these very ordinary houses; indeed, I wondered what the family in England had been thinking when they engaged Fowler Real Estate to sell their unoccupied property at all.
