I WAS THE MIDDLE of three children.
The eldest of us, our sister Charlotte, was living with our aunt in Toronto. Just sixteen, she was already working in a coffee shop, determined—she had told us—to put our branch of the family squarely behind her. Charlotte taught herself guitar, and later travelled to Vancouver and eventually Los Angeles with a band for which she sang and wrote songs. Whether they’re still together and making music, and where she or they might be, I can’t now say with any authority. Someone told me she’d had a daughter, but I don’t know for certain.
With our mother gone from our lives, that left me with Gavin—three years my junior—and our father, Caspar Milledge.
That first summer, after we’d been out of school a week, Dad rented a little wooden cottage for a week at Six Foot Bay Resort. He was thirty-eight years old then. His hair had not yet begun to thin—it was thick and dark brown, and he wore it a little bit long, swept to one side. He had a pushbroom moustache and a perpetual stubble on the rest of his face, though he shaved often and usually smelled faintly of Brut aftershave. He was of average height and naturally thin, but with the ambient doughiness of a man who gets little exercise and who is drunk more nights than he isn’t. He appeared, I know, normal for those times, in that place.
We drove up to the resort in his battered Oldsmobile, listening to the one and only cassette he kept in the car: an album of Cure remixes. Skittery, echoing noises bounced between the speakers, and Robert Smith sang from the bottom of a well. Our familiarity with that tape did nothing to rob it of its strangeness, which increased as the sound gradually degraded, the layers slowly stripped off the magnetic tape by wear, time, and oxygen, the music becoming incrementally more hollow-sounding and alien. It was not the sort of music my father generally listened to, but someone had given him the tape, and he listened to it endlessly—trying, I think, to understand it. He wasn’t a person who listened to music for pleasure. Songs, for him, were a kind of puzzle, a riddle, as though by solving them he would learn what made other people happy. Years later, Gavin would suggest that he might have been trying to find our mother.
Dad said on the drive up that he was going to teach us to fish, though I had never known him to do it, and though neither Gavin nor I had ever expressed the faintest interest in it. Two days into our week there we hadn’t put a single hook in the water. The whole first day we didn’t even leave the cottage; he sat in a deck chair, read magazines, and drank beer, while Gavin and I passed the same half-dozen comic books back and forth.
Early on the morning of the second day, our father woke us excitedly.
“You’ve gotta see this!” he shouted, so we followed him outside. Parked out front was a four-wheeled off-road golf cart. “I rented it for the day.”
Gavin was clearly excited. I pretended to be, but in truth I harboured a fear of anything motorized. When I was much younger I’d had some kind of premonition that I’d one day lose a limb, or possibly even my life, to such a thing. I don’t know why, exactly, but I’ve never totally shaken the thought.
After we had Corn Pops and big glasses of Sunny Delight in the cabin’s tiny kitchenette, we started out. A strong, hot wind riffled the lake and the trees over our heads. It was early in the morning but the heat was already enough to make you think twice about moving. Our sweaty thighs stuck to the cart’s vinyl seats.
Dad lurched the vehicle forward, had it stall, and then restarted it, before moving us along more smoothly across the resort’s broad lawn and up the gravel road which led into it. We began the first half of the day, as the heat grew caustic and the air stiller and stiller, slowly navigating the back roads of cottage country, piloting the very loud cart along snowmobile trails, fire routes, and gravel access roads. We stopped at rocky outcrops overlooking coves and inlets, and at the heads of trails which snaked down through cottagers’ properties toward the lake.
Our father was looking for a specific rock that he and his late brother Bert had discovered as boys. He’d told us about it before. It was, he said, the perfect spot to jump into Pigeon Lake: a fifteen- or twenty-foot drop into bottomless blackness. They did all manner of dives, cannonballs, and backflips. Even swam from there to Fothergill Island, which was rimmed with beach and criss-crossed by trails. He told us it was a place perfect for adventure—that the summer their parents rented a cabin for a whole month was the greatest summer of his life.
He was lost in his search for this spot. Much of the time, he seemed to forget Gavin and I were even there. Other times, he muttered to us about trees or bends in gravel roads that he was adamant he recognized. “Yes! It’s right around here. That tree looks familiar. We’re close, boys.” Each time he was wrong, but every error only fuelled him with a new desperation to find the right place. So we’d climb back into the cart, Gavin on my lap in the passenger seat, and our father would fire the thing back to life, and we’d rumble off to the next site.
I was beginning to suspect that we weren’t even on Pigeon Lake. It seemed likely to me that we were still on Sandy Lake, site of our rented cottage, two lakes over from Pigeon. I shared this with Gavin when our father had wandered thirty feet away from us to inspect a small hill, and Gavin thought I might be right.
But because he was our father, we tried to believe in him. We tried to imagine a world in which his belief was enough to overcome simple facts. We were not yet old enough to allow our impatience and our experience to shape our thoughts in defiance of him. We were, then, still his.
So we drove. He steered us over rutted gravel roads lined in oak and white pine, beaver-sawn stumps, trillium patches, and low wetlands. The cart’s engine was loud and shook violently. Everything he saw sparked a memory in him, but the place he was so desperate to find remained out of reach.
Our father drove the cart one-handed. In his free hand he kept a plastic coffee cup, holding something other than coffee. That was normal for him. I don’t remember just how old I was when he taught me that it was possible to fit an entire bottle of beer in a coffee mug, but I’m certain I was too young for such knowledge. As he drove, he kept telling us about his brother. “Bertie tried to teach himself to swan dive. Come out black and blue every time,” he’d say over the roar of the motor, then take another swig. “Never failed.”
Later, we would come to recognize this as the point at which my father’s lifelong alcoholism had begun to bleed into the soft, porous edge of the dementia which would characterize the last third of his life. It was the beginning of our slow-motion loss.
Dad had always been different. Even we could tell he was, sequestered as we were within the life that he—and, at least initially, our mother—had built, or perhaps cordoned off for us from the rest of the world. We knew how a normal father might behave, by observation and by the stories that filtered to us through friends, and when we turned to look back at our own family with that knowledge, we understood that Caspar Milledge was not a normal father.
The reason is clear in retrospect: his unpredictability. Early on, that unpredictability meant ice cream for dinner, and maybe for breakfast the next morning, too. It meant skipping school to drive to Toronto to go up the CN Tower because the clouds that morning were beautiful and our father wanted us to see what they might look like from a thousand feet above the ground. Such episodes were common, and they were thrilling. But as we got older, Dad’s unpredictability meant missing soccer practice. Or living eighteen months without kitchen counters because he’d decided they needed replacing, had spent a Saturday afternoon tearing them out, and then—either through lack of funds or losing focus—never gotten around to putting anything else in their place.
Over the course of our lives to that point—I was eleven, Gavin was eight—we had come to a place of familiarity with him, despite being unable to predict his actions. We were not surprised when he did something surprising.
I don’t know how that set us up for the rest of our lives. Families fracture. It happens all the time, and as often as not, those caught up in such events recover and resume their life’s path. They do just fine. We’ve all seen that. Who’s to say what caused Gavin’s later addictions, his inability to sustain a relationship, his frequent and varied dealings with the law? Whether that was the result of our father’s actions, I can’t say. I wouldn’t care to make that call.
We hunted in vain all morning, yet my father’s only regret was that his cup grew empty. It was only when he openly debated going back to the cabin to resupply that I think he realized he’d either forgotten how far we’d come, or just how to get back there. It wasn’t embarrassment I saw on his face then, but utter bewilderment. “If I could just,” I heard him say to himself, and then nothing else.
He was starting to leave a lot of sentences unfinished then.
When Gavin complained of hunger, our father reacted as if seized by a great idea. “Oh,” he said, and stopped the cart. He put one foot out the door, stood, stuffed both hands in his shorts pockets, and pulled out a granola bar in each fist. He seemed both shocked and pleased by his forethought, and I realized what had struck him a moment earlier was the memory of having planned ahead—something rare enough to be notable.
Satisfied that he’d carried out a parental duty, he stepped back into the cart and we roared off down another dirt road. “We’re on an adventure,” he kept saying, as if to head off any complaints out of us.
Then, suddenly, we stopped. I think Gavin was dozing, or at least drifting away from our immediate surroundings, because when Dad mashed the brakes, Gavin was nearly ejected over the little dash. He fell off my lap and thudded to the floor of the cart. Our father failed to notice. I helped Gavin out of the tight space at my feet, put my arms around him, and apologized for not catching him.
We were at a place where the road—or cart path, really—came around a bend and then narrowed, before terminating beneath a canopy of very old pine and spruce trees. It was a road meant to service the two or three properties on a point extending into a lake, which our father believed was Pigeon.
Dad was on his feet before the buggy came to a complete stop, and rushed into the forested ditch next to the road. In the direction my father was headed was a cabin, a small, square shack with a dark shingled roof and grey-brown cedar siding. A car was parked next to it. Beyond it, through the trees, was the lake, shimmering and spectral, just out of reach. Between us and all of that—the cabin, the car, the lake—was a bare rock surrounded by coniferous trees and a low tangle of thorny weeds and berry bushes. It glared baldly and flatly beneath the hot sun. Dad stood at the edge of it.
There was a woman. She must have been there all along, but I only noticed her once Gavin quit gasping for breath. We’d stood up, both of us, and had come around the front of the cart with the intention, I suppose, of following Dad.
“Hello,” she said, with a hint of question, a non-aggressive challenge. She had come from behind the car, I think, probably after hearing the cart’s obnoxious engine getting closer and closer. She was maybe forty, sandy-haired, with a long ponytail, wearing a grey tank top and olive canvas shorts, a pair of white Keds on her feet. She began walking toward Dad, but when he looked up at her she stopped.
I couldn’t see Dad’s face from where I was standing, but I know the expression he must have been wearing: crazed, nearly, or fixed, his eyes big and his mouth a determined straight line below his moustache. It was a look I knew my father to take on unconsciously, when someone tried, unsuccessfully, to commandeer his attention while he was focused on something else. Usually it was me or Gavin, and we were almost always out of luck.
“Can I help you,” the woman said. This time there was a high ring overtop her voice, a tension like a guy wire in a high wind.
Our father stirred as if woken. “Hi. Okay,” he said. “Sorry. These are my sons, and this is a spot where I came. We swam. My brother and I.”
“How nice,” she said, with some suspicion.
“We were kids. Their age,” he said, looking at us. “I was hoping to bring them here so they could swim, too.”
“It’s a good spot,” she said, “but when did you do that?”
“Oh, a long time ago.”
“Okay,” she said. “Are you sure this is the place where you did that? This is my family’s place. All this. Always was.” She crossed her arms across her chest and held her shoulders.
“Must have been before the place was built,” he said. “I remember this rock, and the way the bay dips in here. Exactly like I remember it.”
“Sorry, I really think you have the wrong place,” she said. “The cottage is almost fifty years old. You really don’t look old enough to have come here before it was built.”
“Oh, I think you’re wrong,” he said.
It’s hard now for me to describe just how unremarkable the spot we were standing in was, for that part of the world. We could have been next to any one of a thousand lakes in the area. There were trees, and rocks, exposed roots, and the tiniest wind coming gently off a picturesque lake, all of it beneath a hot summer sun, staring back at us with a stony indifference. There were many structures like the woman’s cottage, some of them decades old but still appearing temporary, destined to fade and be forgotten, while all the rest of it persisted. I doubted, taking all of this in, that my father truly believed what he was saying to the woman.
“Please,” she said, now appearing a little agitated. “I’m sorry, but this isn’t the place you remember.”
“Pigeon Lake,” he shouted. “I just want to take my boys swimming in Pigeon goddamn Lake!”
Gavin backed into me, visibly afraid, aware even at his age that our father could always be counted on to say the wrong thing, angering or confusing or tainting strangers, convincing them of our recklessness and strangeness by association.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “See? This is Sandy Lake.”
“No,” he said too quickly, “no. Nice try.”
“Sir,” she said, “please, I’m sorry to say, but you and your sons are on the wrong lake. If you go back out the road until—”
“No, that’s wrong,” he said through clenched teeth, a bit of colour coming to the back of his neck. “You’re wrong and I know it. Sorry, miss. Sorry. But I’d like to show them myself.”
He leaned forward and took a step. Though she stood twenty paces away, she took a step back.
“No, please,” she said, determined but obviously unconvinced of her ability to make him see the sense in what she was saying. “I have to ask you to leave.”
“Are you kidding me,” our father said. “Are you goddamn well kidding me?” He stopped walking and looked at her with something like astonished anger or, if I’m to extend my father any charity, honest incredulity—incredulity, perhaps at the ease with which loss sneaks up on and then overtakes us. “You really mean to tell me that this isn’t the place I remember?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“Well, Jesus, I can’t believe this. You’ve got nerve.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Lying like that. I get it. You look at me and you don’t trust me. But okay, look at these boys. Do they look like scam artists?”
“I’m sure you’re not trying anything, sir,” she said, “but you really do have to go.”
“Put up a sign or something. Private Property: Keep Off. Get a gun and you can wave it at people like me who just want to see the lake. I think that’s pretty awful, ma’am.”
“Please.”
“With all due,” he said, and stopped. He knotted up and held his breath in his chest for a moment.
She had taken a few more steps back, toward her car. I didn’t blame her. I knew what it looked like when he was kept from something he’d set his mind on. It looked ugly. He intended only to resurrect a memory, to splash in the water of his boyhood—but she had no way of knowing that. I know he would not have harmed her, but I also knew, even then, the threat a man posed to a woman, knew that she had to remain wary for her own protection. The fear in her eyes was palpable, and it left in me such an overwhelming state of helplessness. I couldn’t communicate with her any more than I could with my father. We were all, in that tableau, completely isolated from one another.
Finally, he moved. Dad came back to the road, kicked some gravel off into the weeds and scrub, then sat down heavily on the cart’s seat. His face was red.
“Get in, guys, and we’ll head back,” he said to us quietly.
He started the buggy and continued a few yards down the road until we reached its end, then piloted the cart through a tight one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc to retrace our route back past the woman’s cabin.
She was still standing on the other side of her car, watching us, her hands near her throat.
We kept driving back up the road for ten or fifteen minutes. When we reached a point where the road branched, our father stopped and got out and began pacing. “Fucking hell,” he said. He looked at me, I suppose because I was the oldest child there, and he said, confidingly, “It’s a hell of a thing. This age. Too old to be stupid, too young to be wise.”
He looked suddenly at the forest then, as though a voice from there had spoken to him.
“Why don’t you care?” he asked.
At first I thought he was talking to Gavin and me. But he wasn’t, he was directing his question to a tree, or the trees, or to everything he saw, all the wild and untamed things before him, the things to which our lives did not matter at all, not our thoughts or our achievements.
We remained lost until nearly sundown, and when we finally found the resort again, my father said nothing about Pigeon Lake, or swimming with his brother, or any of it.
The rest of the week, we spent all our time reading and sleeping and not fishing. Counting the hours until we could leave the Six Foot Bay Resort and go back to our messy home life with our sick father and our missing mother and our absent sister and no countertops and the faulty set of expectations with which we’d been equipped. Back to life as we knew it.
What aches most in me now, when I think of that episode, is the complete and utter uselessness of love and all its attendant emotions in the face of such intractable things as loss and decay. My hopefulness and affection could not bring our father back from the dark forest into which he was receding. His love for us—which I know he felt, for all his missteps and lapses—was a leash he had dropped and then watched slip away through the uncut grass. It would do him no good. Everything I remember of him is, in one form or another, a vision of us losing him, and him losing us. The process, worming into his memories and his logic centres, was likely underway before we were even born, and would not halt. Though he would live another twenty years, he would become a man we could not recognize, and who would not know us in turn. Not our faces, not even our names.