Leaving the World

by Douglas Kennedy

  ‘How about a drive?’ he asked.

  ‘Out of town?’

  He caught the worry in my voice.

  ‘That’s what I was thinking – but not south. We don’t have to head down there.’

  South meant Townsend and the badlands. We don’t have to head down there. Was this Vern’s way of dropping a hint that he was on to me?

  ‘I was thinking northwest – if that was OK with you?’

  ‘I think I can do that now.’

  We headed off, CBC Radio 2 (as always) playing on the radio. There was an uncomfortable minute or so when we didn’t seem to be able to say anything to each other.

  Then: ‘I want to apologize,’ I said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For calling you a drunk.’

  ‘Why apologize for an observation that is truthful? I’m a drunk.’

  ‘It was still a lousy thing to say.’

  ‘It didn’t bother me.’

  ‘Well, it bothered me.’

  A pause. Then he asked: ‘Have you been following the news about Ivy MacIntyre?’

  ‘I gave up on news a few months ago.’

  ‘Then you missed all the big stuff. Seems that Brenda MacIntyre was having a big fling with Coursen, not knowing that it was he who was holding her daughter. She’s gone into hiding since then, public opinion having completely turned against her.’

  ‘How’s the girl?’

  ‘The doctors actually managed to save her foot. Otherwise she’s been sent to some rehabilitation place outside of Toronto where they deal with children who have been through severe trauma. I know all this because every day there’s been something on the case in the Herald and on the news. The press can’t get enough of it.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘There’s no question that Brenda’s going to be declared an unfit mother and Ivy – when she’s ready – will be found foster parents.’

  ‘And how did the police and the press deal with the fact that they so demonized George MacIntyre?’

  ‘A major mea culpa from the RCMP, an editorial in the Herald apologizing for rushing to judgement, and the province has just announced compensation in the form of a two-million-dollar trust for Ivy MacIntyre.’

  ‘That’s not going to bring her father back,’ I said. Once again I saw her lying face down in the car, telling me how desperate she was to see her daddy.

  ‘According to the press she still keeps asking to meet the woman who rescued her. And the press keep upping the reward for the person who will come forward and reveal themselves as her savior. So far around fifty different women have said it was them.’

  ‘Evidently there are a lot of “Lone Vigilantes” out there.’

  ‘Seems to be,’ he said quietly. Then, with his eyes never once deviating from the road up ahead, he added: ‘But I know it was you.’

  I fought off a half-smile. I failed. Vern’s eyes veered over towards me to catch this. The radio played on. And the matter was not raised again.

  We reached that juncture in Calgary geography where the city drops away and the plains reassert dominance of the landscape.

  ‘Where are we heading exactly?’ I asked.

  You’ll see,’ he said.

  For the next ninety minutes, as we drove steadily north, I kept my head lowered and avoided looking out the window – because as we gained altitude the badlands were soon encumbered by the jagged, epic silhouettes of the Rockies. Once or twice I caught their stern grandeur out of a corner of my eye – and I had to turn away. It was still too hard to look at such beauty.

  Vern knew this, so he kept up a reasonably steady stream of chat, asking about my forthcoming return to the college classroom and quizzing me intensely about every good concert I had heard in Berlin.

  ‘There were no bad concerts,’ I said. ‘Because it’s Berlin.’

  ‘I’d like to find a way of getting over there.’

  ‘You should, Vern. Because sitting in the Philharmonie, listening to that orchestra, would make you happy.’

  ‘Happy,’ he said, trying out the word as if it was a foreign one he had hardly uttered before and wasn’t quite sure how it sounded. ‘Maybe one day . . .’

  ‘Yeah, maybe one day.’

  We passed a town called Canmore, a suburban sprawl dwarfed by mountains. We entered Banff National Park. My ears popped as the road gained further altitude. We ignored the turnoff to Banff. I chanced another glance out the window and again instantly turned away. The road narrowed. We skipped the exit to Lake Louise and the Icefields Highway towards Jasper. Instead we continued our western progress, soon crossing the border into British Columbia and passing an old railroad town called Field.

  It was here that Vern finally signaled a turn off the road: a blink-once-you-miss-it turn. The road suddenly became as narrow as a country lane. It plunged us past a rushing stream and then down a long corridor of densely packed Douglas firs. They towered above us, taking away the sky.

  ‘Not too much longer now,’ he said.

  But it was still another ten minutes before we came to a halt. As the car bumped along the half-paved road, as this forest primeval closed in around us, all I could feel was mounting panic: I can’t go on, I won’t go on.

  But we kept going on . . . until, suddenly, the road ended. This was it. Nowhere else to drive beyond here. Vern parked the car and got out. When I stayed rooted to my seat he came around to my side of the vehicle and opened the door for me.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think I can—’

  ‘Don’t think,’ he said, interrupting me. ‘Just get out of the car.’

  Fear. It’s always there, isn’t it? Endlessly ruining your sleep and holding you hostage and taunting you with the knowledge that, like everyone else who has ever done time on this planet, you are so scared of so much.

  But to give in to fear is to . . .

  Stay sitting in this car, I guess.

  Go on, be brave, shoot crap, take a swing at it – and every other bromide you care to mention. They’re all telling you the same thing: You have to get out of the damn car.

  So I did just that.

  Vern took my arm and guided me a few steps to my immediate right. My head was bowed, my eyes half-shut. I kept focusing on the ground, the paved parking area giving way to a dirt path bordered by deep grass.

  We stopped. I thought: If I about-face now, I’ll be able to make it back to the car and not have to see anything.

  But Vern, reading my thoughts, touched my arm again and said: ‘Look up, Jane. Look up.’

  I took a deep steadying breath. I felt a shudder come over me. I held it in check. After a moment I finally did look up.

  And what I saw in front of me was . . .

  A lake. Absolutely still, serene and, yes, emerald. The lake stretched towards a definable horizon – a vast meadow that, in turn, ran right into a wall of mountains. It was a peerless day in the West. A hard, blue sky, empty of clouds. A sun that, though initially harsh to the eye, bathed everything in a honeyed glow. Its glare forced me to lower my head, but then I raised it up again. The lake was one of topology’s more fortuitous accidents. It occupied center stage in an amphitheater of glacial peaks, many still dense with snow. It was a scenic vista of such scope, such complete purity, that I blinked and felt tears. I had been able to look at the lake. It meant everything. It meant nothing. But I had looked up. I had seen the lake. And that was something, I suppose.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to Vern, my voice a whisper. He did something unexpected. He took my hand. We said nothing for several minutes. I turned my gaze from the lake to the sky. And somewhere in the messy filing cabinet that is my brain came a remembrance of a particular sleepless night some months past. Up with grief and the sense that I was now living in a fathomless world. Surfing the net, trying to murder the hours until first light – and suddenly deciding to Google the word ‘uncertainty’. And what did I find? Well, among other things, there were several pages on a German
mathematical physicist named Werner Heisenberg, the father of the Uncertainty Principle who posited the idea that, in physics, ‘there is no way of knowing where a moving particle is given its detail’ . . . and ‘thereby, by extension, we can never predict where it will go’.

  That’s destiny, I told myself after reading this. A random dispatch of particles which brings you to places you never imagined finding yourself. After all, uncertainty governs every moment of human existence.

  But staring now at that deep blue western sky and seeing it reflected in the lake, a second quote came back to me from that web page. It was the notion, put forward by another physicist, that space was a field of linear operations. Heisenberg – ever the pragmatist – would have none of it.

  And what was his famous retort?

  Suddenly I heard myself saying out loud: ‘Space is blue and birds fly through it.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Vern said, trying to make sense of this non-sequitur.

  I looked at him and smiled. And said again: ‘Space is blue and birds fly through it.’

  Vernon Byrne thought this one over.

  ‘Can’t argue with that,’ he finally said.

  And we kept looking at the lake.