I navigate the morning traffic heading out of Quebec City, going over the old bridge, which is never as busy as the new one and has no guardrails to keep men from diving into the river below. My father’s revelation is typically opaque. My mother was more translucent; her moods were bottle green and had sharp edges if rarely a sharp focus. The last thing she did before going into the hospital was to make a stained glass whale in her backyard studio. While Evie and I cried in the house and my father knelt in the garden, she worked. Then she shut the studio door with its glass pane of camellias still broken and went to make sure my father had put her bag in order according to the way she had dictated. My tireless mother did not approach her rest restfully, if anyone ever does. I have never been in an angrier hospital room. She fumed as my father tried to hold her hand, as if to stay angry was to stay awake. She died in the night while I tried to sleep in a hotel room in Saint John. And then I was angry for her, carrying a flag she had been forced to put down so she could lie under a bronze plate laid flat on the ground so vandals could not upset it, so it could not tilt like old marble markers do in the grass. My father is too forgiving to be good at being angry and he does not want anyone to have to hold his hand. He will never take his turn to be the furious voice in the room. He could just be lonely. Evie and I don’t visit enough. He could just want a ride to the city. There are plenty of reasons to go to Toronto and self-harm is only one of them. This house I didn’t grow up in is built on soil too sandy for a good garden, but my father likes to cultivate plants that thrive on abuse and too little sun. After they both spent decades teaching sociology at the University of Toronto, my parents bought a house that had belonged to a pair of my father’s aunts. They drove away the cats and optimistically uninstalled the motorized chairlift that went up the stairs. I park near the garage. I inhale salt and walk past blueberry bushes covered by nets to keep the birds away. A short hike would take me to the shoreline. I could visit the fog, the encroaching presence of which renders everything foreground. It robs you of long distances. Anyone who grows up with the fog for a neighbour is bound to be driven crazy by the proximity. “Hey, starfish,” says my father, leaning out from the front porch’s screen door. His eyebrows are getting shaggier, threatening to outgrow his face, but he still has the mouth of a declaimer. “Tea’s up.” Inside, the house smells like gingersnaps and my father offers me a plate of cookies and a mug of tea. I look from one to the other. “You’re kidding, right?” “Have a cookie, Caro. I’ll have a beer. You won’t. You’re driving the first leg.” He waves me into a front porch crammed with bookshelves. The stacked pages are getting so yellowed, they are slowly becoming insulation rather than reading material. I sit in an armchair and inspect a gingersnap. My father sips his beer and looks out onto the front garden. “Sweetheart, I won’t go into the hospital.” Another sip. “You can lend me a hand here. Evie wouldn’t. You know how sentimental she is.” Evie is as sentimental as an axe. I shift my weight from one leg to the other and the small mountain of cookies on the plate threatens to shift and cause landslides in my lap. “And I’m what, crazy?” My father points at me with the open mouth of his beer bottle. “Well, come along then. Maybe you’ll talk me out of it.” “Dad.” I wet my pointer finger to pick crumbs from my jeans. I scrape my fingertip with my lower teeth, tasting ginger and cloves. “I made those today. There’s plenty for the trip,” he says. “You’re trying to bribe me with food?”
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“Just letting you know I have too many for one person.” He stands. “I’ll clean up the kitchen. You have a think. And another cookie. Your mother would have kittens, seeing you so thin.” Any kitchen sounds are deadened by the mouldering pages. I look out into Dad’s ever-aspiring garden. In the morning, the shore breeze and the dew will make salt water drip from the leaves of the blackberry bush. If I convince my father to stay, I will have to wash the berries clean after I pick them or they’ll taste like the tide. He isn’t supposed to be lonely. He runs the local United Church Men’s Group. He isn’t supposed to be crazy. He does crosswords. After a good stare, I walk out to the kitchen, where my father stands at the sink, freckled elbows deep in soapsuds. “Why Toronto?” I ask, leaning against the door frame. “There’s bridges here. And the sea. The sea’s good enough for plenty of people. Great Aunt Constance, for instance. It’s practically a Canadian Heritage Minute, drowning yourself in the Bay of Fundy.” “Not here,” my father says. He hands me a dishtowel and talks to the sink. “The Bloor Street Viaduct over the DVP was scheduled to have a barrier put up. Some god-awful ugly thing, delayed again. It’ll ruin the view. But it’s back on schedule and starting construction in a few days and I’d like to get there before it does.” “What would Mom think?” “You know your mother was a great believer in self-determination” is all my father says before scouring a baking sheet with a handful of steel wool. “We can take turns driving and be in Montreal by morning. We’ll save on hotel bills.” He points at me with an orator’s precise gesture. “There’s your inheritance to think of, starfish.” “Thanks, Dad.” “You’re certainly not getting any insurance.” We drive. We trade seats whenever the one driving gets too tired to be trusted on the highway. I snore loudly enough to wake myself just before we hit evening traffic near Rivière-du-loup. I lie in the back seat, waiting for the lights from cars to lengthen and disappear across the car’s interior as other vehicles pass by. I eat a gingersnap. When I was young, we would drive from Toronto to St. Martins every summer. We would cross eastern Quebec by night and the only one awake would be my father at the wheel. Evie and I would be in the back, surrounded by blankets and books that would spill out onto the pavement when we opened the car doors. I didn’t want to arrive anywhere; I only wanted to be driven along the way. Even on the way somewhere familiar, possibility unfurls. Arrival is just a coda. He sleeps through Drummondville. A few hours before dawn, we pull over by a lake outside Gananoque, at my father’s insistence.
Rafael Sottolichio, PaySage améRicain no. 7 (2000), oil on canvaS, 46 x 61 cm. / PaySage améRicain no. 39 (2002), oil on canvaS, 46 x 61 cm. couRteSy of the aRtiStS and galeRie laceRte aRt contemPoRain.
impact of the kitchen tiles. My hands are only slightly red. They have my father’s short fingers and long palms. They don’t shake.