I knew hundreds of people in the industry; my career wasn’t over. It was simply going sideways. I became a casting agent at a talent agency. A desk job. I was twenty-eight at the time. Thirty was waiting for me in the shadows, and with it, the need to prove that I was actually making something of myself. That I was taking life seriously. That I could afford to buy some of the creature comforts of life that I had heretofore disdained. I met Stephie on my twenty-ninth birthday. She didn’t remember me from the Manspray days. I had grown a beard to hide behind. In those photos taken in our first year together, she looks like my little sister. She was always touching me, hooking her arm through mine, and clutching my hand. She was like a kitten removed from its mother too young. I was flattered to be so needed. And I was flattered because I’d thought that being with someone beautiful was a pleasure I’d left behind.
She made me shave my beard a month shy of my thirtieth birthday. Suddenly, the discrepancy in our ages was not so glaring. My face was less boyish than I’d remembered it, but it was still a good enough face. And time was working quickly on her. Her girlish smile had become more strained, more urgent. She was going into education. She was going to be a junior high teacher, and then we’d settle down, and in a few years have our first baby.
I never understood why someone so young wanted to get old so quickly.
She drove me to the airport. It was an uncomfortably long drive because the conversation was skirting around the fact that she was still resentful of me going back to Edmonton without her.
“I’ll be busy while you’re gone,” she said. “I have that Ed Psych project, and I’ve ended up with Thomas, who is so lazy, so I’m sure I’ll end up doing most of it myself. Then there’s my aunt visiting my parents on Tuesday. You’ll miss that. They’re having lobster. Mmmm. Lobster. Are you jealous?”
I murmured something to be agreeable.
“They wish you could be there. Mom said she wants to smother you in a hug. You’re her boy now, she says. Her son. They really love you. It’s terrible what’s happened, Luke, but that makes it a little better, doesn’t it?”
I nodded. It had always struck me as artificial, the “love” that her parents showered on me, especially the mother. In her family, they were so hungry for love, so needful of human contact — that’s where Stephie got it from, I’m sure. I prefer people who are confident being alone. I can only pity someone like her father. He explained to me once, jokingly, that he had given up thinking for himself twenty years ago and now let his wife do the thinking for him. “It’s much easier that way,” he said. We were in IKEA, five paces behind our womenfolk, and his wife had turned to see what he thought of a particular lampshade. He put his head close to mine and said, “We both know very well that my opinion doesn’t matter.” He seemed delighted.
The car had arrived in Richmond. Stephie brought us to a halt at a traffic light. It was a cloudless day and you could see the mountains baking across the bay. It was warm enough to have the windows down. The sun was gleaming off the steel and glass of the cars. On a day like that, you imagined you could be in Rio de Janeiro or somewhere else exotic — somewhere not Canadian. This is why I had so badly wanted to live in Vancouver. You really felt like this was the place where you could become somebody.
“You’ll miss this,” said Stephie, with a flash of insight. “You don’t belong on the prairies.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t like her speaking for me.
“What do you mean? Of course you’ll miss it. You’ll miss me and the family, of course.”
“I thought you were referring specifically to this.” I waved my hand out of the window. “Vancouver and all of this.”
“I did mean that. And me and Mom and Dad and my sister, and even my aunt.”
“Yes, I’ll miss all of that,” I said, stifling a sigh.
No, it was the mountains and the sea and the trees and the beauty of everything that I would miss. But the beauty was bitter to me. It was glamourous, and by this point in my life, I was also supposed to be glamourous. Now the beauty simply reminded me of my failure.
There were a dozen I-love-you’s at the airport. I did feel guilty leaving her. But when I finally went through security — from the sentimental to the mechanical — I couldn’t help but notice that I also felt relief.
5
From the sky, Edmonton looks like a giant circuit board. The streets and avenues are its wiring and the hard bumps of the square buildings are its nodes. The plane lingers only briefly over this before the quilt-work of the farmland resumes in yellow and green squares. You fall out of the sky and into the middle of nowhere. You hurry down the pedways of the airport with the knowledge that only your loved ones will care that you arrived. The huge prairie sky couldn’t be more indifferent.
The crowd heaves a collective sigh. The crowd says with a shrug of loosening shoulders, silently, we’re home. And what else could the crowd say? What else could Edmonton be but home? It’s not like arriving in New York or London — or even Vancouver — where it is likely that you arrived with a purpose in mind, with an air of expectation, with a sense of excitement. You return to Edmonton like you return to your bed.
I had finally come home, and Laura was waiting for me at the baggage carousel, more like a mother than a sister. She had become fat. This change would not have seemed so drastic to me if I had been a more conscientious son and brother and had returned home more than once every few years. There was a lot I had missed. When I had last visited, her youngest child, Emma, was still in diapers. Now she was four. Chloe was ten and Tom was thirteen. A teenager.
She hugged me, and I was briefly lost in her pillowy chest and fragrance. Then she held me back at arm’s length.
“You still look so good,” she said. “It’s not fair.”
She laughed the kind of laugh that masks an urge to cry. She was visibly glad to see me. There was no one else with her. Howard was home with Emma and the other two kids were at school. She took my shoulder bag and I heaved on my suitcase. There was a clunky Ford Windstar waiting for us on the third floor of the parking lot. A real family wagon.
“The wind’s getting chilly,” I said, before getting in.
“There could be flurries tonight,” she replied. “It’s October, Luke. It’s Edmonton.”
It was a long drive from the airport to the house. She talked the whole way, as if talking were swimming and stopping would mean sinking. Once I’d established the tangent she was on, it wasn’t necessary to absorb the details. It was news about the family and her new job with the government. Its purpose was to say that, despite everything, life was continuing just fine. We didn’t talk about Mom and Dad.
I listened to the sound of her voice. She was visibly struggling with what had happened. There was no doubt for her about the tragic circumstances we found ourselves in. She had lost sleep — you could see it underneath her eyes. The tiny veins were like a broken cobweb. I tuned out her actual words and instead observed how a grieving human behaves. The way I would behave if I were also a genuine human being.
Howard greeted me at the door, smiling stoically, not the slightest bit uneasy about giving me a firm embrace. The kids hung back at first — especially little Emma, who had no idea who I was. Howard said something about how good it was to see me, even if under circumstances like these, and I agreed, it was awfully good to see him too. Only a tag sticking out of the back of his sweater revealed the slightest sign of disorder. He was watching over dinner, ordering Tom to help me with my suitcase, urging Chloe to finishing setting the table — quarterbacking the difficult evening.
“Come and say hello to Luke,” Laura urged little Emma, visibly irritated that I wasn’t being universally welcomed. “Come on.”
Emma tentatively accepted my hand. I asked her about herself, and she proceeded to tell me about some book she was reading, only it turned out that it was her parents that had been reading it to her. Anxious to win some points with the family, I said, “Why don�
�t we go read that book right now?” Howard and Laura thought this was a good idea, so Emma and I adjourned to the living room while dinner was coming together.
Soon we were all around the dinner table. It was five o’clock — far earlier than I would have eaten with Stephie. The older children were chattering away, one after another, one cutting off the other. They had a million questions for me. They wanted to know why they couldn’t see me on television anymore. Laura and Howard had actually taped my Manspray commercials and practically everything else I had ever done. It was a bit embarrassing. Tom and Chloe clearly thought it was the coolest thing ever to have an uncle on TV and didn’t know why I’d disappeared from the screen. But hadn’t I explained this to them last time? Uncle Luke has a desk job now. Uncle Luke helps other people get on TV. And sometimes even in movies! You know the kid who played Tom Cruise’s son in War of the Worlds? He used to be my client! Tom and Chloe tried to look impressed. Unfortunately, neither of them had seen War of the Worlds.
Howard and Laura looked at each other and then at me, clearly sympathizing with my discomfort.
“How’s Stephie?” Laura asked.
“She’s fine,” I said. I started telling them about Stephie and the children lost interest in the conversation. They focused instead on wolfing down their roast chicken, potatoes, and stuffing as quickly as possible. It was a wonderful meal. Laura and Howard shouldn’t have gone to such lengths just for my sake, I said. Suddenly, Chloe was asking if she could get down from the table. Immediately afterwards, Tom announced he had to call a friend. There was a brief argument, but the parents relented when I made it clear that no one should be forced to stay at the table for my sake. So both Tom and Chloe left the table and vanished. I felt that I had sunk in their esteem. I’d gone from somebody they could brag to their friends about to nothing special. Just someone with a desk job like anyone else. At least Emma stayed. From her high chair, she stared at me, and at a lump of mashed potato on her plate.
Once Emma had been put to bed and the other children were in their respective rooms, Howard, Laura, and I retired to the living room with a bottle of wine. The conversation went where it had not yet ventured.
“Is there any news on Mom and Dad?” I said. “On the autopsy, I mean.”
Howard looked at Laura and evidently decided to do the talking for her. I feared I might have been a little too blunt.
“We got the results earlier today. Your father had almost zero blood alcohol content. He wasn’t driving drunk.”
“Why was there ever any suspicion that he was drunk?”
“The police talked to an old woman whose house overlooks the railway crossing. She witnessed the crash. She said their car was driving erratically. But they weren’t drunk.”
This is the first I’d heard of an old woman.
“Did she think they were drunk?”
“We don’t know,” said Howard, shaking his head.
“Well, it wouldn’t be like them to drive drunk,” I said. But it also did not seem like them to be out at two in the morning, nor did it seem like them to be traveling well over the speed limit. The whole violent death did not seem like them. To collide with a train? A fucking freight train?
“It’s a freak accident,” said Howard. “They must not have seen the train coming. Those uncontrolled crossings are dangerous.”
Laura was silently crying. You could only see it by the glint of the tears rolling down her cheeks. Howard squeezed her hand. I dropped the subject just as abruptly as I’d raised it.
It was better after the tears. Howard volunteered to play the piano. He earns his living by giving piano lessons and plays very well. He played a very slow and sweet sonata. My sister and I simply watched him.
Were the kids alright, I asked, once Howard was done. It was so much easier to talk about the impact of the deaths on the kids than on us. Laura said that the kids were very resilient. Emma was too young to know much about her grandparents, Chloe had cried, and Tom had asked a lot of questions, because like me, he didn’t understand how such a thing had happened.
We turned to other subjects. Laura was happy to be balancing her freelance projects with government work. The kids were a joy. Howard liked working from home. They had planned a holiday in Kelowna for next summer.
For my part, I tried my utmost to avoid any hint of self-pity in reporting my news. I was fine. My job was fine. Stephie was fine.
I couldn’t help but think of the required emotional detachment, if that’s the right word — maybe duplicity is more accurate — to discuss our bourgeois, comfortable lives, while Mom and Dad were lying side by side in caskets, waiting to be lowered into two holes in the ground.
6
My parents’ funeral was on the outskirts of town. The dead are buried there, row after row, as if in a warehouse. The sun came out and everyone was overdressed for the sudden heat. Beads of sweat were rolling down Jacob Brookfield’s meaty face. I had never seen him look so uncomfortable. Normally he is self-assured and smug. His wife Stella was crying, and the mascara was smudged on her face. They both looked at me awkwardly and gave me pained smiles. That was the correct etiquette for smiling at a funeral, I guess.
I never liked the Brookfields. Jacob and my father Leonard had studied geology together, and joined faculty in the same year. I took a course from Jacob once; his lecture style was pompous and authoritarian, and he flirted with all the girls. His wife had shared an English class with my mother Mary, who was taking nursing at the time. For Stella, the English class was just her usual dabbling, in the same way that she dabbled in a whole bunch of things — psychology, home economics, even astronomy. For my mother, English was a requirement of her nursing program. She graduated, but never ended up becoming a nurse after having Laura and me; Stella didn’t graduate at all. She attempted a few hare-brained schemes, including trying her hand at farming. As a child, I remember her frequently expressing envy at my mother’s rural upbringing. She wanted her own little rural utopia. In New Sarepta, she and Jacob found a beautiful plot of land, but the farming never succeeded. There are still to this day some dilapidated hutches for chickens behind their house. But the chickens, along with all of Stella’s other agricultural ambitions, were abandoned decades ago.
Besides the kids, Howard, Laura, the Brookfields, and me, there was my uncle Herbert and my great-grandfather Julius, both on my mother’s side of the family. They had driven in from the ancestral home of Camrose. They didn’t say much. They aren’t big on talking on that side of the family. There was also my mother’s closest friend, Julia, who seemed so old now. She had developed odd tics since I’d last seen her: a trembling of the hands and a bird-like bobbing of the head. On my father’s side of the family was Aunt Denise from Halifax, and that was it. Nana and Gramps had died within a year of each other a decade ago. To make up for the lack of family, there were a host of friends and colleagues — too many to name.
I didn’t like the anonymity of the graveyard. It was an industrial-sized plot of land. I felt angry at the banality of the ceremony. I hardly talked to my family on the drive back into town. The children were also subdued. Tom and Chloe were silently flipping through the pages of a book in the back, Emma had fallen fast asleep in her little seat beside me, and Howard and Laura were silent pilots in front.
The memorial was held at my parents’ house by the Mill Creek Ravine. The streets of the neighbourhood were blanketed in leaves. The fall was well advanced and the limbs of the elm trees scratched at the sky.
When we arrived, the Brookfields’ Toyota Matrix was already parked outside the house. The couple was still inside, heads close together. The windows were darkly tinted. It looked like a car for drug dealers. They emerged when the kids sprang from our van.
They cooed over them, and in their excitement, became like kids themselves. They did not have children of their own. The memorial drew more guests than the funeral. Laura had busied herself in the early morning getting things ready. There was a small feast of
snacks: sandwiches, cheese, crackers, vegetable plates, cold perogies, sour cream, and cabbage rolls. It all disappeared quickly.
The speeches were wildly different, with Julia’s going on for close to fifteen minutes — interrupted by tears and snuffles into a crumpled-up Kleenex — and following a stream-of-consciousness flow which often lost the entire crowd. Julius from Camrose kept his speech short. He was master of his emotions and not a victim of them — something he clearly disdained in Julia. He had difficulty saying the words. He disappeared after his speech. When he finally reappeared, you could tell he had been crying.
The other speeches — I won’t get into the other speeches. They were clichés. Maybe Howard and Laura and Aunt Denise couldn’t translate into their own words what was happening inside them. They used expressions that had stood the test of time and so communicated safely to us what had to be said. And the crowd appreciated it. After Julia’s strange and unpredictable twists and turns, everyone wanted to keep to the straight and narrow.
Laura pulled me aside and whispered, “Say something, Luke. I know you don’t want to, but you should try.”
I shook my head. I felt like an imposter — an imposter in the very home that had been mine until seventeen years of age.
“I think everyone has had enough,” I said.
“Try,” she urged me again.
“I can’t,” I said, and I made sure that it sounded final.
During most of the memorial, the Brookfields kept separate from the main crowd. Jacob was more than capable of glad-handing and schmoozing his way with people, but Stella, as the years had worn on, increasingly seemed only one harsh word away from a nervous breakdown. I know for a fact that she actually did have at least one nervous breakdown many years ago. Jacob had become her caregiver. At the memorial, he made sure she had food to eat and that her glass was full. She seemed intermittently anxious and enthusiastic. If she knew someone, she suddenly smiled and gushed on endlessly, and it was hard to get a word in edgewise. But with those she didn’t know, she was like a shy kid in a playground of toughs.
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