by Miriam Toews
Natalie and Hubertus gave me the money for a ticket and said all they wanted in return was for me to promise to come back. Aggie didn’t want to come with me which is good because I didn’t want her to either. She’s young enough that my father could force her to stay at home and I didn’t want to go through that again. Aggie wants to go see thousands of naked people in the Zócalo having their picture taken. Noehmi is on her spring break from university so she’s going to take care of Ximena (whom she has started calling Cricket) so that Aggie can still go to school while I’m gone and Natalie’s friend Fernande is going to do my job for me for the few days that I’m away because she needs extra money to pay her divorce lawyer. Ximena can’t come, obviously, because she’s not even supposed to be alive. This time, if my father asks me where my sister is, I’ll ask him the same question.
I’m on the plane. I don’t know what to write.
Should I write down my dreams?
The time is 11:02 a.m. My name is Irma Voth. I’m on a plane. I’m not a good person. I’m not a smart person. I might be a free person. If this is how it feels.
I scratched that out because there were only parts of it I thought were true and closed my notebook and looked out the window at air. I opened my notebook again thinking that I had all sorts of ideas and things to write about but now I’m not sure. I heard my mother’s voice. Irma, she said, just begin.
I want to be forgiven. I want to be forgiven for causing the deaths of so many people I’ve loved. I feel like that might never happen. I don’t know how it will happen or if it will happen. I don’t think it will but I want it to. I don’t feel forgiven by God. I want to be forgiven by the people I love. Wilson told me that art is redemptive. My father told me that art is a lie. I can’t forgive myself but I can forgive my father. And my hope is that we’ll both be brought back to life.
I rented a small red car at the airport in Chihuahua city and drove the twisty desert mountain road to Cuauhtémoc and then I drove the flat, hot highway home to Campo 6.5. I drove past Carlito’s rundown house and Alfredo’s well-kept farm with plastic flowers in the planters and past the crashed crop-duster where I’d asked Jorge to meet me for the first time. I saw a cow with his hoof stuck in the runner bars that were there to prevent him from escaping. I knew from experience not to try to help him because he’d be violent and enraged. I drove past the filmmakers’ old house which had been my cousins’ old house. I felt the tender touch of Wilson’s dying hand on my body, on every part of it, and heard him call me beautiful. Are you still alive? I said.
The house that Jorge and I had lived in was missing. There was black grass where it had been. That’s all. No sheds either. Nothing. Jorge, I said. I’m so sorry. I pictured us in a lighthouse in the Yucatán, slow dancing in a round room, looking out towards the Caribbean Sea.
I kept driving. I saw my little brothers playing with a dead snake or something on the driveway and my mother leaning against the fence like she’d been out there for a long time, weeks, maybe months, just waiting for me to show up. I got out of the car and waved to her and started walking towards her and then she began to run. She was running and laughing. She was running and laughing! And then we were hugging each other so hard, my God, she was strong. She wouldn’t let me go. My brothers joined us in this wild, joyful embrace and then I saw my father coming out of the house, using his hand to shade the sun from his eyes, and he also came towards us, not running and laughing but walking firmly and steadily. And I remembered a few sentences from Jakob von Gunten, which the bookseller in the park had given me:
And one day I would be a beggar and the sun would be shining and I would be so happy, and I wouldn’t ever want to know why. And then Mamma would come and hug me—what nice imaginings these are!
And then I parked the car and walked towards my old house. The curtains were closed and it was late in the day, stars were everywhere, and I could hear the incomprehensible noises of different animals attempting to communicate with each other in the dark and the voices of my brothers and my parents singing some old ancient song in Low German and I stood outside the door for a while and listened before I went inside to say hello, how are you?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For their tremendous efforts in the making of this book I’d like to thank Sarah Chalfant, Michael Schellenberg, Hannah Griffiths, Louise Dennys, Marion Garner, Kelly Hill, Deirdre Molina, José Molina and Nicola Makoway.
On this page I quoted from a beautifully written obituary sent to me in a letter from a friend. I know that it ran in the Globe and Mail newspaper but regret that I have no idea when and do not know who was being so well celebrated.
Many thanks to Neal Rempel for kindly giving me permission to use some of the details of his play The Last Words of Duct Schultz for my own purposes in the book, beginning on this page.
MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of four previous novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck; A Boy of Good Breeding; A Complicated Kindness (winner of the 2004 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction) and The Flying Troutmans (winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize), and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. She lives in Toronto.
