“Always on May eleventh the weather is beautiful,” Mrs. Richter declares.
“Is that true?” Mr. Richter says, sounding astonished. He drives below the speed limit, sitting very straight.
“Always,” she says firmly. “Always on Abel’s birthday.”
We are on our way to the ravine to scatter his ashes. The funeral was so crowded that at least a hundred people had to stay out on the church lawn, but today there are only the three of us. Mrs. Richter holds the box, not an urn but a carved wooden box. I have the three green plastic bowls that I bought yesterday at Zellers: green, his favourite colour, plastic because the glass ones were too heavy. We have rolled the windows down, it’s so warm … already, at only nine o’clock in the morning. Spring has come early this year, the forsythia blossoms finished, the big hardwood trees in leaf. Abel used to keep charts of when the leaves of certain trees opened. This year I have found myself keeping a mental note. Horse chestnuts: April fifteenth. Maple saplings: April sixteenth. Oaks: April twenty-ninth.
At the top of the ravine, there’s a small paved lot, empty at this hour. We set the bowls on the hood of the car and Mrs. Richter pours out the ashes.
“So,” says Mr. Richter, who has never been here before. “The famous ravine.”
But not the ravine it was. A six-lane highway now cuts through it about a quarter of a mile to the east of the river, roughly following the river’s course. The sludge factory is gone. Camp Wanawingo has been turned into a grassy area that the city supplies with picnic benches and garbage pails. This walk down, however, is much the same, with the wooded slopes rising up steep as walls. On the eastern slope the white bloodroot flowers are like little jagged cups. A brown butterfly flickers above them.
“Look!” Mrs. Richter cries. “What kind is that?”
“A mourning cloak,” Mr. Richter says.
“Ah,” she says.
We stop and watch it. Are they thinking it’s Abel, or a sign from Abel? I say,“If you want, you could start here.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Richter says, smiling at me,“let’s get started.” She goes over to the flowers and throws a handful of ash as if she were broadcasting seed. Mr. Richter goes to the other slope. He looks at it a moment, then selects a silver birch and carefully distributes a bracelet of ash around the trunk. I wait; I want to save mine for the cave. Because I knew I’d be climbing, I’ve worn running shoes and blue jeans. Mr. Richter wears a black suit. Mrs. Richter is all in red and orange—red skirt, orange shawl, a red bandanna around her head. You’d think she was on her way to a carnival, and it’s true that her mood seems gay. She hums and sways her hips, moving down the path.
I point out where the sumach grove is, having told them in the car that it was one of his favourite spots. Then I head for the cave. “Take your time,” Mr. Richter calls after me. “We’ll meet you back at the car.”
I’ve brought a Swiss Army knife, but the nettles have died back and I climb up easily. How many years has it been? Fourteen. Fifteen. Bars of sunlight spread across the ledge and into the cave’s mouth. I let myself imagine that they’re a sign from the Angel of Love, who, not unexpectedly, hasn’t appeared since before Abel died. I take a step inside. Without even looking up I know that the bats are gone. I go farther in. The spears are gone, too.
I start scattering the ashes. What do I feel? A heaviness of heart. I had hoped to feel something more, to have a revelation, but the things that occur to me have occurred to me a hundred times before. His excruciating sensitivity to the physical world. His rapturous dreams. His guilt and anguish over the death of the baby bat. His dread of interfering and of choosing. But why did he have these feelings in the first place? Why was he who he was?
I go back out onto the ledge and turn the bowl over, letting the wind take what’s left. I look for the Richters. After a moment I see them heading toward the river. I’d better go down, they might lose their way. They seem to get confused a lot lately. It doesn’t strike me as a sign of age, though. They’re like children, expressing amazement at the most casual news, stopping to stare, as if everything they’ve gone through has made the world more scenic.
The three of us eat an early lunch at the Greenwoods shopping centre. Over coffee Mrs. Richter asks where my mother’s ashes are, and I am forced to admit that I haven’t scattered them yet.
“Oh, Louise,” she says,“it’s time.”
Back home, after they drop me off, I go down to the basement and retrieve the urn from behind a bunch of old paint cans and bring it upstairs. I suppose I could just throw the ashes in my rose garden. But they’re red roses and I think she liked only white. I can’t remember.
I carry the urn outside and look around the lawn and this I do remember: her arguing with my father that it would be better to have stone courtyards, you don’t have to mow stones. I start walking up to Queen Street, toward the stores. Melba’s Fashions, Lila’s Beauty Salon. But when I get there I wonder what I could have been thinking. I can’t just throw the ashes on the sidewalk for everyone to tramp on, and nobody’s going to let me scatter them inside the stores.
I head east along Queen. I enter Kew Gardens. It’s sdii a gorgeous day, more like late June. I walk past people lying on blankets, past the purple and yellow petunia beds, the tennis courts. None of this would have appealed to her. I reach the crowded boardwalk. She hated crowds. What about the beach? We never went to the beach. I imagine her looking at the sand and seeing only dirt, looking at the sun-bathers and seeing only fat. I go to the shore and consider the blue lake, the blue sky, white seagulls lounging on air currents. What would her objection to this have been? Oh, the water’s polluted, the seagulls are vicious.
My vision blurs with unshed tears. Abel we could have scattered anywhere. So why don’t I just scatter her anywhere?
I can’t. Somehow I can’t.
Back at my house the door is open. I forgot to lock it. I go into the living room and push aside the things on my mantelpiece—books, a stone Buddha, the meteorite—and set the urn in the middle. It really is lovely; she probably picked it out herself. Of course she picked it out. She wouldn’t have risked the chance of being put in anything vulgar.
And she wouldn’t have wanted to be on a mantelpiece, either. Out in public.
I pick the urn up again and go out to the sun porch and put it on a shelf between some vases and clay pots. There, that’s better. Whenever I’m out here—watching the sun go down, looking at my roses—I’ll see it, I’ll think,“My mother.” I won’t forget her, that’s for sure.
Not that I would have anyway. Not that we forget.