Mostly, as it turns out, in Mont-Tremblant I smoke and drink wine by the poolside wearing many sweaters. I remain, well, roughly catatonic. My father is dying. Yet again, it seems. Even though it is July, in Mont-Tremblant, the weather is frigid and the swimming pool is in deep shade under many tall evergreens and slashing birch and maple trees. They drop their leaves on the surface of the pool. If I dive in, which I have done once, it almost stops my heart from the cold. Almost but not entirely. I can go into the sauna to recover and then into the hot tub. It’s a cycle. The cold plunge, the hot sauna, the cold plunge, the hot tub. But mostly I sit. I am reading a novel about all these women murdered in Juárez, Mexico. Hundreds of seemingly unrelated murders of women. A town that kills women.
Why, I wonder, would anyone have thought to put a pool into this wintery ski chalet? I suppose, it is the best of all worlds.
When I am not sitting in a catatonic fashion by the side of the pool, smoking, while layered in many sweaters, and when my husband is not fever-writing a novel, we sit in the evening, in front of a fireplace, and we watch House. House is a doctor who solves the most unsolvable health things. He is also a Vicodin junkie. No one dies on House’s watch.
When I leave this husband, several years later, I say, where were you when I found out my father was dying?
I was with you, he says, in Mont-Tremblant.
I only remember you writing a novel.
You remember wrong, he says. I drove you through the mountains. I built you fires. You were so cold.
You were writing a novel and I was sitting by the pool, smoking.
You were a zombie, you were paralyzed. I couldn’t get you to move. I couldn’t get you to go out of the house except to drive in the car through the hills. That was all. You wouldn’t leave the car. If I went to a store you would sit in the car. You were basically already a ghost. I didn’t know what to do. I was with you when he died. I went with you, he says. I gave the eulogy, for Christ sake.
It’s true. I can’t blame him for that.
I tell someone else, Yes I don’t know what happened that day in the airport, the day my brother drove me there. What happened with my brother that day in the car in that conversation? It wasn’t just the botched surgery. Possibly it was this way of seeing that there was a fantasy escape route my father might have been on if he would have been lucky. There was also perhaps this indescribable pain of knowing how poorly my brother had been used, been wrecked for all time by this little tiny event. A brain event. In a tiny vessel.
I was upset, I tell a friend. I was in a confused state, in a deadened state. I could barely get on my flight, and then as the plane took off, I was crying, in not the usual way. The tears were there but as if not emotional. They weren’t accompanied by, you know, sobbing or anything genuinely affective. Just like when you are really tired and your eyes water. Involuntarily.
What it sounds like, says the friend, is rage. They talk about it when someone goes on a killing spree. It’s that kind of silent rage that is so encompassing it feels like you are in the eye of a storm.