“I remember.”
“You said you had to go home.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “I understand. I understood, even then. You wanted to stay. I could tell. I wouldn’t have asked otherwise. But you had to go home.”
He didn’t say anything, remembering the sound of her voice. He hadn’t heard it in more than thirty years, but it was so familiar to him he was amazed he could have forgotten.
“I wanted to stay,” he said, lost in the memories of his time with her. She had shown him worlds he could only imagine, worlds he had lost when he stepped away from her.
“I know.”
“Is . . . Is Brian with you?” The words came hard, and he already knew the answer.
“Yes.”
Jeff felt an unaccountable relief. Brian wasn’t lost. Brian was just . . . gone.
“Did you ask him to stay with you?” His voice broke on the whispered words.
She looked at him.
“No,” she said.
His heart clutched at a final hope.
“He asked me.”
A sob rose in his throat, but he pushed it back down.
He remembered the places she had taken them. The air was so pure, the light so bright, everything outlined with a subtle glow.
And he knew he had spent the years since he had turned away from her, spent his whole life, in a world of greys and half-measures, the reality around him a pale shadow of the worlds he had tasted. The worlds he had lost.
“Is . . . is he safe?”
When she smiled, the clearing seemed to glow around them. “He’s blessed.”
The words caught at his breath and tore it away. “Be . . . Take good care of him,” he said, in a voice hollow and powerless.
“He’ll come to no harm with me,” she said, and though the words were soothing, they did not take away his pain.
When she stepped away, turned back to the forest and faded into the green and brown, Jeff Page fell to his knees, his back heaving with broken sobs as he cried for what was lost. For what he knew would not return.
After breakfast the Sunday morning he disappeared, Brian had gone up to his room. The sound of the back door closing as his father went out to his shop echoed through the house.
He had barely slept the night before, too filled with excitement, with thoughts of the day — the days — ahead.
He unzipped his knapsack and set it on his bed for filling. The microscope in its case took up most of the space. He slid the plant guide in beside it, and a sweater. He didn’t think he’d need clothes, but he was a bit worried that he might be cold at night.
Looking around the room, he tried to figure out what else he might need. His compass. A magnifying glass. The picture of the three of them — he and his mother and his father all together — that had been taken at Disneyland. The slingshot his father had given him.
The thought of his father made Brian pause. He wasn’t mad at his father. Carly was right: he just didn’t understand.
He thought of leaving him a note, but he had no idea what he would write. He knew his father and mother would be sad or scared, but there were no words to explain what he was doing, where he was going, what it all meant.
As he zipped up his backpack, he took a last look around his room. The books on his shelves. The posters on his walls. The schoolbooks on his desk.
As he walked down the stairs, he trailed his fingers along the cool walls, listened to the echo of his footsteps.
He took one last look around the kitchen, at the table where he and his father ate every meal, at the dishes on the counter, at the toast on his plate.
He slipped on his boots and coat, and closed the back door for the last time.
He stopped in front of the open door to the shop, and looked inside. The smell of oil tickled his nose, the way it always did. His father was under the car, his sticking-out legs the only part of him that was visible.
He didn’t speak. Tears streaming down his face, he raised his hand in farewell, and turned away, setting out across the field for the woods.
Jeff Page never told anyone what had happened to him in the woods, either as a boy or that morning after Brian disappeared.
The search for the missing boy went on for weeks. Newspapers as far away as Toronto wrote about the disappearance, and TV crews from the city parked their vans in the field beside the house. Diane answered most of their questions. When they had Jeff on-camera, he was barely able to articulate his loss. He seemed to have given up, long before the searchers did.
Some days, after the search, after the headlines, Jeff would find himself in the woods with no awareness of how he had got there. He would find the quiet of a clearing near the forest’s edge, or tuck himself into the lightning-struck cave at the base of a giant cedar tree, and just sit. He would sit for hours without moving, listening to the wind in the leaves, the sound of birds around him.
He would sit for hours, waiting, hoping to hear, just once, the echo of distant laughter.
And at night, he would stand in the dew-wet grass of the back lawn as the dusk settled around him, looking out at the darkening swath of trees, the black hill behind them. He would stand there until full dark, looking for small, luminous figures in the distance, waiting to hear his son call to him, Brian’s reedy voice calling to invite him to come away with them.
He would have gone.
But the call never came.
And once the full dark came on, he would turn away, walk back into the house. He would close the door behind him, but not lock it.
He never locked the door again.
And he always left a light burning.
Notes
I wrote this novella over the course of a month or so in the summer of 2006, using a Lamy 2000 fountain pen loaded with Noodlers Black in a standard issue, middle-grade composition notebook.
While I was writing, I was listening, exclusively, to the first two albums by The Band: Music From Big Pink and The Band. Something about those songs, utterly contemporary (even now, some forty years after their release), yet utterly timeless, put me in the perfect mindset for this story, set as it is on the rubicon between contemporary and traditional storytelling, between domestic reality and mythic fantasy. At one point, I decided to change the music — a month is a long time to spend several hours every morning listening to the same two records, over and over — and almost immediately, the writing stopped. So, after a day or two of frustration, I put the albums back on. It seemed to do the trick.
This story was finished sitting in the woods a short distance away from the shores of Cowichan Lake, smoking a cigar and listening to my son in the distance, playing in the water with his aunt and uncle, his mother and grandmother. It was one of those perfect moments.
The title of this novella is lifted shamelessly from “The Stolen Child” by W.B. Yeats. The poem was an inspiration, but it’s not an answer, should you be inclined to look for one.
Mom, this one’s for you. And for anyone reading in Agassiz, BC (“The Corn Capital of British Columbia”). And for anyone else who might be wondering.
Some truths are slow to sink in; there are things that you know, implicitly, without necessarily grasping their full implications. Over the last year, for example, it has been brought vividly to my awareness that, despite the best of intentions, writers often don’t know just what they’re writing, even as they’re writing it.
I should have known, though. That fact was certainly brought home to me a few years ago, when my first novel, Before I Wake, hit the shelves and people started asking me questions that simply hadn’t occurred to me. I realized then, from their questions, that there were whole aspects of that book that I had no real awareness of having explored.
If you were to ask, I would tell you that — consciously — I’m a narrative-focused writer. To my mind, story is the main thing. Give me a good plot, and some good characters to see it through, and that’s all I can ask for. I don’t get hun
g up on the language of a story or novel; in fact, I prefer that the language be as transparent as possible, not drawing attention to itself and, more importantly, not drawing attention away from the story and the characters.
When people started asking me about Before I Wake, though, I realized that I also wrote — completely unbeknownst to myself — with a considerable emphasis on the novel’s sense of place. To such a point that people, especially readers in Victoria, were singling out that aspect of the book for special emphasis.
And there was always one question that came up, over and over again: why Victoria? Why had I chosen to set the novel in Victoria?
The answer I tended to give might have seemed flip to those asking the question, but it wasn’t, really. It was the only answer I could honestly give: I set Before I Wake in Victoria because that’s where it happened.
No, not literally — this is fiction, after all. But it’s where the novel happened in my head. And once the geographic specificity was pointed out to me, it made perfect sense.
I’ve always been a believer in something I’ve come to call “personal geography” (or, if I’m feeling lofty, “psychic geography”). There may be some arcane science that goes by that term, but I use it to refer to the way we reflexively and subconsciously build maps in our own head.
Note the plural: maps.
Take me, for instance. Anyone can log into GoogleMaps and pull up a map of Victoria and have a pretty clear, if abstract, sense of how the city is laid out. That’s cartography. At a personal level, though: I’ve lived in Victoria for more than twenty years now; there are parts of the city I know very well, and parts that are a complete mystery. My personal map of the city, therefore, has incredibly detailed portions (downtown, Fernwood), and some areas that are barely more detailed than a street-map (Oak Bay, Gordon Head).
Picture one of those old encyclopedias, with the sections of transparencies to illustrate, say, human anatomy.
The cartographic map of Victoria is the base sheet, carefully labelled, and filed with the National Geographic or whatever society keeps track of these things, all grids and conspicuous landmarks (the Legislature, the Empress Hotel). Personal geography is the stack of transparent sheets that overlay that base sheet. The first one is knowledge: the sheet slides into place and certain areas of town go dark, and others become cluttered with landmarks.
And the next level, the next transparency sheet, is experience. In those bright, landmark-dotted areas of the map, there start to appear footnotes, memories. Beacon Hill Park where, during Luminara, I walked around in the gathering dark smoking a cigar and being part of a family-friendly group hallucination as powerful as any drug I’ve ever taken. The corner of Government and Yates, where I spent seven years working in a bookstore and where there’s a Starbucks now (a Starbucks where my best friend — and former co-worker — and I insist on having a coffee whenever he’s in town from Toronto, a bit of Venti-sized gravedancing). The various stores — Munro’s Books, Curious Comics — where I’ve spent too much time and money over the years. And then there are the missing places, sites that have disappeared but still occupy the personal map: that building will always be A&B Sound to me, no matter who takes it over. That building was the glass-blowing studio where Xander spent so many enthralled hours before they closed up shop. The restaurant where I interviewed Susan Musgrave, that’s now a different restaurant where I’ve never been. The first bar I ever went to when I was legal, which is now a strip club, where I . . . nevermind. Ad infinitum.
This isn’t a radical thought at all: everyone has their own personal geography of the places they know. My Victoria is my own, an image shaped from my experiences and my interests. I can tell you, for example, where every bookstore — used or new — is downtown, but I haven’t the faintest idea of where one could buy shoes. I know where to find the best prices and selection on CDs, but I’d have to look up a men’s clothing store in the phone book. Or stumble across it by accident. That’s the “personal” part of personal geography; we all create our own cities around us.
But there’s one page of transparency left. And as it slowly drifts into place, certain points on the map spark with an electrical current. Places I might not have even known I knew existed, or attached no particular memory to, crackle off the page.
The last transparency sheet? Resonance.
The funny thing about resonance — in general, I mean — is that you never know when it’s going to hit, or just how hard it’s going to hit you. That’s why you can hear a song a thousand times, but when the circumstances are just right, the opening notes take you back, body and soul, to being in a car on the highway, watching a beautiful girl sing along, knowing with a gut-clenching certainty that there’s more to this new relationship than meets the eye. That’s why the smell of baking bread and cinnamon opens a door to a kitchen full of family, laughing and joking and eating, with no idea of the sadness that will inevitably come to them. That’s why the touch of a certain breeze can transport you to a west shore beach, the feeling of wet socks and the laughter as a little boy looks for fossils in the rocks, and that’s why the sound of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations will always be the sound of falling in love. Resonance is the ghosts that haunt us, always present, whether we’re aware of them in the moment or not.
Resonance is where, for me, the writing happens, geographically speaking.
Take Before I Wake, for example. The novel opens with a car accident, a hit-and-run, in a crosswalk near Hillside Mall. That crosswalk was part of the “knowledge”and “experience” levels of my personal geography: I used it every morning on my walk to work to cross the six lanes of traffic separating me from the bookstore. And the cars would whip through, regardless of who might be in the process of violating their God-given right to arrive at work as fast as possible, pedestrians be damned. The close calls, and the fear, gave that crosswalk resonance. When I needed a place for the hit-and-run to happen, well, there it was.
Similarly, Royal Jubilee Hospital. After the accident, Sherry is taken to RJH, and her parents spend a long time in the Emergency Room. Been there, done that. RJH is part of my knowledge, and part of my experience. The resonance, though, came from a very long afternoon in the ER when my wife was suffering a kidney stone attack a few years before I wrote the novel. I channelled the whole thing into the novel, not just the physical particulars, but the sense of helplessness that comes, that freakish distending of time that only occurs in hospital waiting rooms. And the resonance, it turns out, led me astray: RJH doesn’t treat children. A little girl hit by a car would have been taken by ambulance out of town to Victoria General for treatment. Accuracy be damned, though: it’s the resonance that matters.
And now that I’m aware of it, it’s easy to see that that resonance, and my underlying interest in the physical place of my writing, has continued. My forthcoming novel, for example, is also set largely in Victoria. Thus, there’s a musty, cluttered, antiquarian bookstore en route to downtown that plays a significant role in the book: Poor Richard’s may be long gone from the actual map, but it lives on in my soul and, as Prospero’s Books, in my work. And it’s not just Victoria: there is a scene in the Astor Court, the gorgeous Zen scholar’s garden in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and something terrible happens in a Portland hotel room. Well, the Astor Court is perhaps one of my favourite places on Earth. And I’ve stayed in that very hotel room. Resonances. Always resonances.
(As an aside, there is something interesting about resonance, I’ve discovered: it’s cyclical. The act of writing about a place renders that place resonant, even if it wasn’t prior to the act of getting it down on the page. Thus, walking around downtown Victoria is, these days, often a little surreal, with places given additional weight through their writing. And writing tends to fix those places, permanently, in my mind. Thus I’m surprised whenever I’m at RJH to discover that it has a sleek, modern ER, not the cracked, dingy hell-hole that I have in my memory, my soul, my bo
ok. And the library hasn’t looked like it does in Before I Wake since before the novel came out. Often, walking through these familiar places feels like walking through a dream, or a dissociative state. It’s like I don’t know quite what’s real, and what’s not. Which, now that I think about it, is pretty much how I spend every waking moment, so . . . no harm there.)
My sense of place, and its importance, is perhaps closer to the surface when it comes to Henderson, the setting of The World More Full of Weeping, though the issues are a little cloudier. Actually, a lot cloudier.
A little background to start: I spent the first seventeen and a half years of my life in Agassiz, BC. Fourth generation.
The joke in Agassiz is that there are people from there, and newcomers. The dividing line is the flood: your family was here before the flood, or you’re a newcomer. Of course, the flood occurred in 1948, which might give a sense of the Agassiz mindset. A skewed one, but a sense nonetheless.
(Another aside: it just occurred to me that I grew up in the distant shadow of the flood of ’48, and with the annual awareness of the river rising against the dikes. Is it any wonder, given the universality of floods in world mythology, that I gravitated to a mythic interest? Things to ponder . . .)
Agassiz, at the time I was growing up, was home to about 3,500 people. A very small town. I had a wonderful and terrible childhood and adolescence; how I characterize it typically depends on what mood I’m in when I’m asked. Right now, I’m feeling a cautious warmth toward the world (it’s 5:44 a.m., the sun is coming up, and the coffee is kicking in), so I can say that, despite the bullying and the pain and anguish that came with chunks of my teenage years, I had a pretty good childhood. I remember being outside all the time, riding my banana-seat bike in the driveway with my brothers, playing with the kids down the road, exploring the woods . . .
The woods.
Always the woods.
Here’s the thing: Henderson is not Agassiz. Agassiz is not Henderson. I just want to be clear from the outset.
The World More Full of Weeping Page 6
