I Was There the Night He Died

by Ray Robertson

  Which is why the first prospective buyer is coming by to look at the house in less than seventy-two hours. Which is why I’m on my knees in the bathroom. With every cleaning-up and clearing-out, however, my parents’ house disappears a little bit more. I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, but it feels as if I’m doing something wrong. Each carefully packed cardboard box and rapidly stuffed green garbage bag erases my mother and father just a little bit more. I’m scouring and sorting underneath the bathroom sink when I find the mirror my mother kept for plucking her eyebrows and making sure her hair was okay at the back. When I was a kid, if it was too cold or too hot outside for road hockey or there wasn’t anybody at home to ride bicycles around the subdivision with or to stomp through the nearby corn fields with—our GI Joes and Johnny Wests dangling from our hands and ready for action—you had to try and make your own fun. I’d get the mirror from under the bathroom sink and hold it underneath my chin and walk around the house, eyes never leaving the mirror, everywhere I went the opposite of everything the way it usually was. The ceiling was now the floor, and I walked across the ceiling. The light fixtures became obstacles to be avoided, and I either stepped over or around them. Going in and out of doorways was about the same, only now you knew where they were by the doors hanging from the ceiling. When I’d get tired of defeating gravity I’d go find Pepelou, our cat, who would usually be sleeping on the living-room carpet. I’d get down on the floor beside her and nudge her awake, place the mirror in front of her face. The idea was to get her to recognize herself. I’d push the mirror closer, I’d pull it back to give her some perspective, I’d lie down on my stomach and hold the mirror flat on the floor in front of me and get my face in the frame beside hers, but none of it mattered, she just wasn’t interested, her eyes would be open but she just couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see herself.

  Too much of this sort of packing will give you a sore back and a sorer heart, so I go to the fridge for a Mountain Dew and pop its top standing at the front window. Surprise, surprise, there are no surprises, 2:16 pm today the same as 2:16 pm yesterday and no doubt tomorrow afternoon at 2:16 pm as well. An empty street and frozen front yards and parked cars ad infinitum, notwithstanding the occasional house that hasn’t had its Christmas lights taken down yet. I’m almost ready to get back to my garbage bags and boxes when I spot Samantha’s father step out of their house and wobble down the sidewalk for his thrice-weekly afternoon liquor store run. I’ve noticed that he usually gets picked up by a minivan cab earlier in the day—likely DUI-licenceless and wanting to avoid any overlap with either Samantha or her brother returning home from school—but time sure does fly when the glass of straight vodka in your hand makes it difficult to read the watch on your wrist.

  He from the end of his sidewalk and I from my living room both see the same thing—a white minivan turning the corner onto Dahlia Avenue. But what I know is just the man next door returning home from his shift at Biddel Tires, Samantha’s dad is sure it’s his taxi come to take him to the liquor store at the Thames Lee Mall, his tottering steps into the street when he sees my next-door neighbour stopping and backing into his driveway testament to his frustration with this obviously confused cabbie. When he teeters into the middle of the road he stops and wearily waves the reversing minivan his way. When my oblivious neighbor finishes backing all the way in, Samantha’s father has had enough, has indulged this fool for as long as he can, puts his hands on his hips and shouts what I can hear through the window, “No, no, no, you’re here for me. Do you hear me? Hello? I’m the one who called the cab. Hello? Hello?”

  Retreating to the bathroom before this scene plays itself out is a crime against literature, I know, my naturally voyeuristic nose for such an incipient disaster nosed out, however, by the realization that this isn’t just some drunk I might be able to utilize for comedic purposes in one of my novels, this is Samantha’s father, this is the shit she daily has to live with.

  I get back down on my knees and take my mother’s hand mirror out of the box intended for Goodwill. Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up needing it someday.

  * * *

  “And here’s one more, just one more. This one is of Francine and Constance, who you’ve both already seen, but in this one they’re with their cousin Priscilla, my brother’s daughter. You remember my little brother Tyler, don’t you?”

  Not really, no, I barely remember you, in fact. “Tyler, right, of course. Your little brother. What was he—one, two years behind us?”

  “Hold on a second.” Barry Hamilton pleads for my continued patience with a raised forefinger while playing with his phone until he locates the shot he’s looking for. Finding it, he pushes the phone six inches from my face. “Not so little now, is he?”

  No, he certainly is not. Even if I could recall what Tyler Hamilton looked like twenty-five years ago, I likely wouldn’t be able to make the connection between him and the short, rotund, balding, bearded man in the digital photograph that Barry is sticking up my nose.

  “The little SOB is down in Toledo in the front office of the biggest safety consulting firm in all of Ohio. They’re the number one single supplier of qualified personnel to the Department of Homeland Security in the entire Ohio-Michigan area. The little SOB has got a half-a-million dollar house and a Porsche Carrera GT. Can you believe that?”

  Rachel spots me halfway across the gymnasium and manages to say hello without speaking or using her hands, and I tell Barry I’ll be right back while giving him a duplicate of the forefinger he’d used to invoke my patience instead of the one I’d much prefer to supply him with, and meet her by the refreshment table.

  “You and Barry all caught up now?” she says.

  “The only thing more boring than other people’s photographs are other people’s dreams.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve had some dreams recently you might not find so boring.”

  Common courtesy almost compels me to ask what they are until Rachel’s dirty smirk informs me that they’re not the sort of dreams one discusses at an information dispensing session in a well-lit high-school gym. I repeatedly dip a tea bag in my Styrofoam cup, but even this seems too forward, as if, in lieu of suggestive hand puppets, I’m doing my best to flirt right back with the limited foodstuffs available. I drop the tea bag in the garbage pail.

  “So your community spirit got the best of you after all,” Rachel says, swishing a wooden stir stick in her own Styrofoam cup.

  “That, and I got tired of cleaning up my parents’ house.”

  “Laura Mackenzie’s your real estate agent, I hear.”

  “I guess I have you to thank for that.”

  “Or blame.”

  “She seems okay. Better than when we were all here, anyway.”

  “A bitch yesterday is a bitch today.”

  “She wasn’t that bad.” I look over my shoulder to make sure she’s not standing behind us.

  “Maybe not to you.”

  A hum of a microphone followed by, “Can we please have everyone take their seats now please?” and everyone does just that, fills the ten or so rows of nicked and dented grey metal folding chairs that we used for school assemblies two decades ago. Instead of déjà vu, however, I feel the same thing I felt twenty-five years in reverse, like sneaking out before the boredom begins and there’s no chance to get away unnoticed. The woman at the podium thanks us all for coming and someone else for supplying the cookies and someone else for the muffins and by the time she’s going over some of the questions that were raised at the last meeting, I’m knee-over-knee, chin-in-hand pretending to pay attention to what she’s saying while really studying my fellow Cougar alumni, who are interspersed in the audience with the concerned parents of present CCI students.

  It’s not who’s here that’s so absorbing—all of my old teachers are either retired or dead, and most of the people I was closest to back then didn’t stick around town too long after graduatio
n—but what happened to the ones that are here: somehow they got old. The men who were boys when I knew them have nearly all capitulated to the twin taunts of thinning hair and receding hairlines and have shaved their heads to varying degrees of bristly clean, so much the better to view their fleshy faces and bushy eyebrows. The girls turned women look like nothing so much as their mothers: short hair, flat shoes, flabby arms. All of which means that I must be old now, too. Forty-four is old, I know, but knowing isn’t feeling, and feeling, as everyone knows, is how we really come to know something. Seeing silver in all-star point guard and Reach for the Top team captain Tommy Anderson’s hair—barrister Tommy Anderson, LLB—makes me feel old. Discovering that several of my former classmates have children of their own at the very same high school that we attended makes me feel old. Learning that Richard Stokowski died of leukemia three years ago makes me feel old.

  Rachel doesn’t make me feel old. Sitting beside me in her Jimmy Choo heels and sleek black skirt and dangling Prada handbag, Rachel makes me—me, in my Levis and Blundstones and short-sleeve western shirt—feel like a lucky lumberjack who’s stumbled into the wrong seat but who has yet to be ushered out. But that’s in my head—in my nostrils, it’s 1980-something and eleven o’clock on Saturday night at someone’s house party way out in the country, and it’s spring, finally spring, spilt beer and wood smoke and a warm breeze carrying the faintest, surprisingly not unpleasant stink of skunk spray. I uncross then recross my legs, forcing Rachel to do the same.

  “Try to stay awake and I’ll buy you a Budweiser after this is over,” Rachel whispers in my ear. I can’t identify her perfume—it’s different from Sara’s, the only perfume I’ve nosed first-hand for a long, long time—but it’s nice, floral fresh, but not too sweetly chemically strong.

  “Make it a Heineken and I’ll even sign the petition,” I whisper back.

  “I thought you were a Bud man.”

  “Maybe when I used to shoot hoops in here during second period,” I say, pointing to the basketball net suspended above us like a low brow mistletoe. Budweiser was just another irresistible US import that, like McDonalds and Hershey chocolate bars, was never as good as it seemed like it would be on the American TV commercials you’d seen for years, even though you couldn’t get it in Canada.

  “C’mon, where’s the fun in having good taste when you’re back in your hometown?”

  “Fair enough. Tonight, I’m a Bud man.”

  Rachel pats me on the knee. “Good boy. And not only are you going to sign the petition, you’re going to give me a donation by the end of the night too.”

  In that case, I want to say, it’s a good thing you’re buying the beer, because at the moment I’m the biggest charity case in this gym. I wonder if Uncle Donny bet on basketball games? Somehow it would be easier to take knowing he lost his brother’s shirt betting on a sport he at least knew something about. But that doesn’t make any sense. Uncle Donny has been a Maple Leafs fan for fifty-plus years—obviously he doesn’t know anything about hockey either.

  I listen to the speaker still talking at the podium, and what I hear—annually decreasing enrollment, board of education cost-efficiency, general public apathy—isn’t encouraging, although not surprising. The world needs door-to-door canvassers to raise money for the needy and community newspapers to expose scheming local politicians and internet shut-ins to blather honestly about big business shenanigans, and I thank you—the world thanks you—for busying yourself so busily. But my parents never went to church and I never belonged to Boy Scouts and no one ever taught me that city hall could be beaten. It might have been Epictetus who wrote that “Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one’s desires, but by the removal of desire,” but it was my mother who always said, “Oh well, what are you going to do?” Greek stoicism and Chatham working-class indifference aren’t all that different, the disparity in the number of undergraduate philosophy courses dedicated to each notwithstanding. I hope a way is found to keep CCI open—it’s a good thing, and good things are as desirable as they are uncommon—but I’m not hopeful.

  When the podium is empty and the leftover cookies and muffins are packed away and people are putting on their coats and pulling on their gloves and scarves, I stand and slip on my jacket and am aware that I’m waiting for Rachel, who’s talking to the presenter and a couple of other people. Am I on a date? No, of course I’m not on a date. I’m just going to the Montreal House with Rachel Turnbal for a beer.

  * * *

  The next morning, after Rachel dropped me off at home, I get the bucket and rag and Pine-Sol back out and returned to the bathroom to finish what I’d started. I sniffed last night’s stale souvenirs of sweat and latex and women’s perfume and decided I’d better clean myself before I finished the bathroom.

  I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong—Sara wouldn’t have expected me to take a vow of celibacy—but after I showered and changed and got back down on my knees on the bathroom floor I tugged off my wedding ring and slipped it into my pocket. It wasn’t symbolic, I wasn’t trying to tell myself something, I didn’t feel a sudden release, a dizzying freedom, the bitter sweet beginning of a brand new chapter in my life.

  It was time to scour the tub and I was going to use Comet and I didn’t want to get my ring dirty or worse. And when I was done and decided to leave it on the table beside the bed—where I’d placed our wedding picture, which I’d transferred from the living room—it was only because I had a lot of cleaning to do before the house was sold and everything I was going to keep was packed away and it made sense to wait until there was nothing left to do before I put it back on.

  Chapter Eight

  Now that someone might see me in them, I realize I need new underwear. Underwear and socks. Sometimes life is just that simple.

  There are places other than the downtown mall to get what I need, but I knew I’d end up here. It’s the same reason I don’t choose to buy Heinz Ketchup or Kraft Peanut Butter or Sunlight Dish Soap but always come home with them from the grocery store anyway. My mother bought all of my back-to-school clothes from Sears—first from the catalogue, then in person when the mall opened up around the time I started high school—so that’s where I shop, even in Toronto, for all of existence’s most essential items. When it was time to replace our fridge or a piece of furniture, Sara would attempt to convince me to at least have a look around the sort of glassy and gleamy Toronto shops that always have a complimentary cappuccino bar and several model-worthy salespersons, but I remained adamant about Sears’ sound return policy and reasonable prices. Plus, Sears is where I had my first part-time job, made the money I spent on records and junk food and gas money, my earliest adult purchases. We’re loyal to what made us, whether we take an oath or not.

  “Sam.”

  I’m out of the cold and inside the mall and on my way to Sears—near the lottery booth, just past Bed, Bath, and Beyond—when I’m actually relieved that I’m hearing voices. Because I guess I’m just one of those people who isn’t made to be mellow, it’s time to admit that my attempt to brain-tame myself with weed has been a failure, and who likes to fail at anything? All other arguments against it aside, even if marijuana does seem to encourage metaphysical mellowness and cosmic contemplativeness and the not-unpleasant sensation of not really giving a damn, imagining someone calling out your name in the middle of the afternoon does seem a rather high price to pay in return.

  “Sam. Over here.”

  Except that now it appears as if I’m not hearing things—a not-so-young, not-so-old (my age, if I think about it) couple loaded down with assorted shopping bags like two overworked mules hear what I hear too, look where I’m looking also. Except that the voice calling out my name is emanating from a very large, very furry squirrel handing out leaflets in front of the Bank of Montreal. Either the couple has been smoking the same weed as I have or that’s a squirrel costume with someone inside it who knows my name. I do
n’t have time to consider which proposition is the more frightening.

  “Sam, it’s me, Scott.” The squirrel points a paw at himself. I come closer, but without managing to crack the rodent code. With both paws gesturing toward himself now, including the one holding the leaflets, “Me, Scott Frampton.”

  Scott “Frampton Comes Alive” Frampton.

  There’s always the slightly older guy who isn’t good at sports and isn’t good at school and isn’t, truth be told, the sharpest knife in the drawer, but who makes up for it all by possessing that most coveted of items—a car—and Scott was him when I was at CCI. It was his mother’s car, actually—a blue 1977 Monte Carlo—and being friends with Scott meant that on Friday or Saturday night you’d look for his headlights flashing through the sheer curtains in the living room or listen for the crunch of stone underneath his tires in the driveway. Your coat would be on and your wallet was in your back pocket and you’d already promised your parents you’d be home by one o’clock, and when Scott pulled into the driveway you could breathe normally again and hurry to the door and then coolly walk to the Monte Carlo, hoping to ride shotgun but happy to just have a seat. Just because he said he’d pick you up didn’t mean he was going to actually show, the agony of watching eight pm become 8:15 (he’s just late), then 8:30 (call his house but he’s already left), then 8:45 (coat off, but not put away in the closet yet), then 9:10 and moping in front of the TV and your dad asking if you wanted a ride and you answering no, because it wasn’t about anywhere in particular you were supposed to be, it was all about going.