We escaped before Albert could wander down for more conversation and a spot of fixing the starter motor that I’d already fixed. Vague or not, the lighthouse lady had been right, the wind must all have happened somewhere “over there.” We never saw a breath of it. But there was plenty of ugly swell, lumpy and short, that bedevilled us for the three hours it took to crawl around the rocky defences of the Hesquiat Peninsula. Off Estevan Point itself, the hitchhiking thumb of the peninsula, the sea coarsened like reptile skin as the waves caught on the bottom and began to break. It didn’t last long. Once we’d completed our long turn, the swells lengthened and moved accommodatingly in behind us, and we rode them to the lights that mark the narrow entrance to Hot Springs Cove. We didn’t really need the lights to find our way in; we could just have followed the water taxis from Tofino.
“We won’t exactly be alone,” I said. There were two water taxis tied up at the dock that services Maquinna Park, along with a fifty-foot power yacht registered in Montana. We hadn’t seen one of those since leaving Port Hardy. We headed further into the inlet, looking for a spot to anchor, and a Tofino Air float plane materialized at the end of the cove, dropping fast and heading straight for us. It whacked the water three boat lengths away, throttled back, and chortled on to the dock.
“Let’s get close to the edge,” said Hatsumi.
Over the months we’d cruised together, my wife had carved out, not without some spirited back and forth, a number of niches where she indisputably excelled. Navigation was the big one; an offshoot was a knack for choosing a good anchoring spot. This isn’t easy, because “anchoring spot” means not only the place where you begin to release your anchor but also the place where the anchor actually hits the bottom, the place where it finally digs in and holds, and all the other places where your boat is likely to roam at the end of whatever length of chain you pay out. The paying out of chain I was allowed to keep doing, and I still got to give Hatsumi polite arm signals from the bow that told her when to reverse (to set the anchor) and when to go forward (in case the damn thing hadn’t grabbed). But calculating where our boat would actually end up, given wind, current, distance to land and other boats, was her responsibility. As to my hand signals, she ignored half of them.
“Over there,” she said, pointing to a section of shore where the angle of the rocks suggested a drop-off. So did the chart.
“Are you . . . ?”
“There.”
She took us in to within two boat lengths, watching the sounder, then put Vera into reverse while I paid out the chain. When she shut the engine down, Hatsumi had a big grin on her face. To me, it looked as though I could reach out and pick a fir cone. At night, I knew, the shore would appear frighteningly close. But there would be no float planes in here.
“I guess I have to wear a bathing suit,” she said. “In the onsen.” We could see the dock clearly; another taxi-load of tourists from Tofino stumbled ashore and set off along the boardwalk to the hot springs.
“Alas, yes. This isn’t Japan. You’ll probably be sitting next to a software developer from Seattle. But we can’t go yet. The hot springs will be packed with tourists all afternoon. Once they leave, we’ll be in there.”
***
Waiting was fine with me. I’d left my father dangling after the confusing truncation of his trial, and I knew there had to be more. Above all, I needed to know why the trial was cut short. I wanted to get his story over with just as badly as we both wanted to stop worrying about rocks and fog. I sat myself down again.
Was that really all there had been? Two days, one mauled witness, then poof? I went back over the correspondence file, where there were still some odds and ends I hadn’t yet looked at. It was time for some detective work.
First, I found a carbon copy of my father’s expenses for three trips to Vancouver ($207.75). Frugal as always, he had taken the bus. Above the little invoice he’d reproduced a poem, “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost. The return date was five days later than the last trial transcript I had; something must have kept him in Vancouver.
Next, I found a copy of one of the newspaper stories, the one with Billy’s mom defiantly staring down the camera beside the big, bold quote, “I got so upset, I told him if anything happened to my boy, I’d be at his back door with a shotgun.” (Next to which he’d scribbled, “Then I would have called the police!”) Sure enough, the story was written during the trial, so she’d had her day in court after all — I just didn’t have the transcript. The date of the final disgraceful story (“Doctor Offered Mother New Son to Replace Brain-Damaged Boy”) tallied with his bus ride back to Victoria. Later in the story, the writer listed the expert witnesses heard; all were for the plaintiff.
So there had been more than two days of trial, and it had all been from the plaintiff’s side. My father had sat through at least five days of accusations and lurid media reports and then his defenders had pulled the plug. Maybe, somewhere in the B.C. Supreme Court archives, those missing transcripts are interred as yellowing microfilm, but I haven’t had the heart to exhume them. Maybe he’d had copies after all but had destroyed them. I wondered if, as he sat on the ferry back to Victoria, he had looked at Portland Island gliding past and thought back to the last weekend he’d spent there, relaxed enough to sleep away the day while my mother read and painted.
Missing transcripts or not, what mattered to me was his state of mind. I was trying to understand his reaction to the trial, short or long, documented or not. And he had left some clues. Here were his notes, made at the trial. Many were on Four Seasons notepaper, or in a cheap spiral notebook with a colour photo of two gaudy parrots side by side on a branch. One of them was confiding in the other’s crested ear. He’d labelled that one “Laxton” (the plaintiff’s lawyer) and drawn a balloon with the words, “Let’s go for $4 million!”
A lot of these jottings were immediate reaction to testimony. I read them several times, and it began to sink in that here at last were the answers to the questions I should have been asking when he was still alive. These notes were as close as I was going to get to his feelings as the accusations emerged and he fought to refute them.
They ran from mundane to moral. Some were just technical: “He’s wrong about the choice of shunt type.” “He described a pneumo!” More important to me was his reaction to the charge of “failure to monitor”: “Presumably Dr. Beamish was called at 0015. He wouldn’t just wander in. Why him instead of me?” This, I thought, was the kind of thing he was itching to say in court, if he’d had the chance.
This matter of the phone calls got murkier the more I thought about it. The nurses came across as heroic and frustrated and on the side of the plaintiff. “Something went wrong,” they were said to have told her. “We called him five times.” The media liked this — and used it. But how many times had I myself — has anybody — said, “Look, I tried to call you. A couple of times, really!” We know it’s a lie, a little, ass-covering white lie, but it saves face, and who’s to know? The hospital was being sued too, and that included the actions of the nurses. Maybe, with the nurses, that’s all it was: damage control for them, and let the big-shot doctor fend for himself. I knew, from reading these anguished notes made at the trial, that he was incensed that a nurse’s note of a single phone call “attempt” seemed to count for more than his statement that he would never ignore such a call, had he got it. It was her word against his. I guess he’d forgotten how Harvey Cushing’s nurses felt about him.
From phone calls, his notes turned to the timing of the shunt replacement on Labour Day: “What’s the big deal about a day or two of [raised intracranial pressure]? We see many head injuries recover from two days of pressure.” And this one, which summed up the doctors’ dilemma: “Would not have epilepsy if shunt replaced earlier? Might be dead too.”
These were notes for his defence. There were so many, and in such detail (I haven’t included them all here), it was clear he was itching to get back at the people who were questioning his judgment. Sometimes he complimented one of the hostile witnesses (“He described this okay”); often, he asked himself the unanswerable: “Did A.T. believe me? Does anyone?”
The saddest were the notes that described how he felt as the barrage wore on: “You find out who your friends are.” There was even some Shakespeare, some lines from Othello he obviously knew by heart:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing.
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
It wasn’t hard to imagine him sitting in the courtroom, pulling out his pen and writing these words as his own good name was filched in front of him. And “poor indeed” is exactly how the experience left him.
During what I assume was Billy’s mother’s testimony, my father’s notes became more urgent and longer. He could see which way the emotion was going. The nurses hugging the mother, saying, “Something had gone wrong” — and all the rest of what appeared the next morning in the newspapers. His writing became a scribble, with abbreviations and dashes as he raced to get it all down — even though it was exactly the same recitation as in the examination. But this time, for the audience that counted.
The next day, it was over. All he’d written was “Back to hotel. Vera there. Call from A.T., settled out of court. Problem: the lumbar puncture.” And it was a lumbar puncture he hadn’t even done.
The last note I found was dated just after the trial, after the newspaper stories had appeared. It said, “Fiona asked me if I had turned a little boy into a carrot.” Fiona was one of his grandchildren. She was six.
***
These notes were excruciating reading. All I could think was, Why didn’t you tell me any of this? Why did I have to go through a thousand pages of scribbles and photocopies, half-truths and hyperbole to find out what was going on?
“Nobody asked you to do any of that,” my father said. He was still wearing the ridiculous hat I’d thrown into Haro Strait. I turned on him.
“On the contrary. You asked for it every time you got all defensive about the damn trial. Moaned and groaned.”
“You wouldn’t have understood.”
“What, that some people screw up? That other people are perfectly okay with standing up in public and lying? That they wouldn’t give a shit if you’d trained with Harvey Cushing himself? ‘Truth and hard work is the best way’ — look where that landed you!”
“Watch your language.” He squinted, the way he did when he felt I wasn’t taking him seriously enough.
“Honesty is the best policy? That got you on the front page of the newspaper. Two newspapers! At least, if you’d talked about it to your family, they would have understood.”
“Understood what?”
“That your patients came first. That you wouldn’t have left a patient hanging. That somebody screwed up, maybe a nurse, maybe one of the other doctors. I mean, we just had to accept that on faith. It took me months of slogging through all this shit to realize it was true! One of the other doctors blew it!” I tossed the hated transcripts across the cockpit, missed the seat, and watched them subside untidily into the scuppers.
“I’m trying to do yoga down here,” said Hatsumi.
“Anyway,” continued my father, “even if one of my colleagues made an error of judgment, and I’m not saying he did, that was his call. It could have gone either way.”
“You mean the LP.”
“Yes.”
“So you just suffer in silence? The fraternity of medical brothers?”
“What would you know about it?”
“But you were constantly complaining about this or that colleague, how they had terrible training, how they wrecked patient’s backs, how they couldn’t operate their way out of a paper bag!”
“Privately, in the family. But not publicly. It wasn’t done.”
“Wasn’t done? What do you think that dickhead, who couldn’t even describe a ventriculogram, didn’t even know we have more red blood cells than white for God’s sake, what the hell do you think he was doing? And for money!”
But my father was unflappable. He shook his head. “I wouldn’t do that. And I wouldn’t expect you to either.”
“So you let yourself get taken down by a . . . a neurologist!”
Even that didn’t get to him. “Neurologists are more knowledgeable these days, I’m told.”
“By whom? Is there a whole bunch of you guys up there, wherever that is? Some kind of Wounded Ivy League Surgeon’s Club that meets every Thursday afternoon to congratulate themselves on how they always put the patient first?” I was crying now.
“Leave him alone.” My wife’s face appeared in the companionway. Hatsumi looked serene, as she always does after touching her toes to her forehead on the cabin floor for an hour. “You’ve got it wrong.”
“What?”
“Backward. It’s not that he wouldn’t talk to you. You wouldn’t talk to him.”
“How do you know? You weren’t his son.”
“I watched you. For ten years. And I helped take care of him.”
“You’re talking about me as though I weren’t here,” said my father. “That’s rude.”
“You’re not here,” I said.
“Of course he is,” said Hatsumi. “You wanted to talk to Brian, didn’t you? About all those things?” She waved at the transcripts soaking in the scuppers.
“So I didn’t have to read all this?”
“I could have saved you the effort,” he said. “But I am sort of flattered you didn’t just throw it away.”
“Which you told me to do.”
“That was because you wouldn’t talk to him,” said Hatsumi.
“Because he was impossible to talk to! He always had to be right!”
My father extended two mottled fingers and tapped the pile of soggy paper, like a doctor sounding a patient’s chest.
“Well,” he said, “was I?”
Would a man wracked by guilt have written a book about it? Maybe. But would he have written one in which he never, not once, felt the need to say, “It’s unfair. I’m innocent”? Not a chance. He never said that because, as I’d been taught so well, one didn’t have to.
“Yeah,” I said finally. “I guess you were. Somebody screwed up, made a call that went the wrong way, you closed ranks and took the heat.”
“Something like that.”
I played my trump. “Then why couldn’t you get over it? You paid for the rest of your life. Why couldn’t you just say, ‘I know the truth, the rest of you are beneath contempt,’ just, you know, fuck it? Oh, sorry.”
I knew he didn’t like swearing. But it didn’t matter, because he was gone. I wasn’t going to get the answer I wanted most. I gathered the remaining papers and stuffed them back in their bags. I never wanted to see them again.
“Can we go to the onsen now?” said Hatsumi. “He won’t be coming back.”
“Let me grab my bathing suit,” I said.
***
As it turned out, we could have gone in naked, which is the only sensible way to take advantage of sweet, sulphurous spring water that emerges from a crack in the earth, cascades over a rock shelf exactly at shower height, and meanders through a chain of rock pools to empty into the chilly Pacific. The reputation of the springs at Hot Springs Cove as a spectacular, intimate and unspoiled rotenburo (the Japanese word for an outdoor pool) was built on accounts from fifty years ago, when the only non-Indigenous users were the occasional intrepid boaters. You could still only get there by water or air, but the explosion of tourism in Tofino now meant a daylong stream of water taxis and float planes like the one that had dropped out of the sky on top of us. The three or so usable pools were hellishly crowded now; you had to stand in a towel, waiting your turn, until a rosy, steaming form emerged from one of the pools to make its way unsteadily to the changing rooms in the woods.
But the pools themselves were unspoiled, under protection of B.C. Parks, which acquired the land in 1957 from a long-time resident. All the cranky, stressed-out boater had to do was wait until six-thirty or so, when the last water taxi had returned to the restaurants and spas of Tofino, then row to the dock, walk the two kilometres of boardwalk, and slither into their own private pool.
Which we did, three times in the two days we stayed at Hot Springs Cove. We ignored the “no dogs” sign, as did the harassed-looking park ranger finishing up with his daily tidying after the pools had been used by — how many people? We must have passed thirty of them on their way back along the boardwalk, and it’s probably unfair to say they were all loud, pasty, and smoking, but that’s how it seemed to me after so many days in inaccessible places where the only tourists were there to fish. The boardwalk itself was something of a legend, a kind of yachtie roll call where the owners of visiting boats had carved, chiselled, or scraped the name of their boat into a plank. I found myself reading these planks compulsively, even upside down, which they were on the way back. On either side, ferns burst from the forest floor like green fountains, between waxy salal leaves and nurse logs and stupendous moss-wrapped cedars that had escaped the loggers.
We smelled the pools before we could see them. Hatsumi took the first shift, a look of wonder on her face as she disappeared around a dripping rock while I took Charley to the nearby beach and sat watching the hypnotic breathing of the ocean around the black rocks that guarded the cove. When Hatsumi finally reappeared, she looked beatific.
“Heaven,” she said. “Go.”
“Heaven” was a chain of pools carpeted with flocculent sulphur-slime and fed by a cascade. I stood under the waterfall, closed my eyes, and let the pungent steaming water pound out my noisome cargo of frustration, fog, fatigue. Too bad my father hadn’t hung around for the hot springs; he could finally have gotten warm.
We walked back on rubbery legs, not talking, watched by the silent cedars. By the time we got back to the boat, the fog had found Hot Springs Cove, and Vera was a vague greenish form floating in liquid glass. We ate a simple dinner with the heater hissing and jazz on the stereo. There was wine.
“You look happy,” I said.
“I don’t have the dream now.”
“The dead man?”
“Not since Cape Scott.”
“So maybe that’s all it was. Anxiety.”
Hatsumi smiled.
When I rowed Charley ashore before bed, I rested momentarily on the oars and could hear only the distant tinkling of Oscar Peterson from our boat and, fainter still, small domestic sounds from the family in a sailboat that had arrived while we were in the hot springs. We fell asleep to the sound of the fog whistle on Sharp Point, a single note, attacking and fading slowly, a crystal wineglass out there in the dark.