“We must have moths,” Nurse Jackson said. “Moths, if you can believe it.”
She frowned, as though the incidence of the moths might somehow be perceived as a denigration of her nursing abilities, or worse, the quality of her care for her patients, in this case, my father. Nurse Jackson—whose first name was Ardelia—touched my father’s cardigan, fingering two small holes in the maroon cashmere sleeve. “Just look at his sweater. I never noticed this before.” She laid a light hand on my father’s arm and smiled with the beatitude I’d come to think of as her special gift, not just to her patients but also the universe. “Peter, what happened here? Your lovely sweater.” She turned to me and said, “You bought this sweater for him, didn’t you, Jamie? From Brooks Brothers. In New York.”
I nodded, my throat suddenly full. My suitcases were stacked just outside the doorway to his room. Their presence struck me like a reproach. But if it was one, I was reproaching myself. I was the one leaving him here in this place where the scrupulous standards of cleanliness of which the MacNeil Institute was justifiably proud couldn’t entirely eradicate the perpetual scent of sour urine and pre-made industrial hospital food. The rooms were painted in warm colours in a valiant attempt to offset the sense of loneliness and gloom that permeated the place.
“He told me once,” she said kindly. “He said you gave it to him for Christmas.”
“That’s right, I did. Five years ago. Before . . . well, before this.”
She nodded sympathetically, but not with excess sympathy. Ardelia Jackson believed in the value of living and loving in the present, as she never tired of telling relatives of her patients. She never proselytized, nor did she hector. But she was an adamant advocate for her patients. Nurse Jackson said she tried to see everything as a stage of life to be embraced. When I’d broken down in front of her once and wept openly for the loss of my father as I had known him, she reminded me that he was still in there and that he still felt—and needed—my love.
More than anything else, I needed to hear that, and, even more, believe it. When Ardelia Jackson said it, I believed it.
I pointed to the window, where three small white moths fluttered in the sunlight in front of the glass, obviously confused and trying to escape. “Aha! There are your culprits.” I walked over to the window and made to kill them with my hands, but Nurse Jackson laid her hand on my arm to stop me. She reached out and unlatched the window and the moths fluttered out of the room, vanishing around the edge of the building into the morning sunlight.
“Jamie, your father would hate that. He’s gentle about things like that. Even things like killing insects. He may not notice much most of the time, but he always seems to notice everything that has to do with any living thing. To him, they’re all God’s creatures. He told me that, too.”
“He’s always been like that,” I said. “He’s always been gentle. You’ve been good to him, Ardelia. I can’t tell you how much that’s meant to me.”
She winked. “I’m not supposed to have favourite patients, but I can’t help myself. Peter is special. He’s a wonderful gentleman. He always reminds me of my dad. Dad was sweet like Peter is now.”
Nurse Jackson had told me one evening that her own father had lost his battle with Alzheimer’s when she was a still a little girl. It gave her an affinity, she said, for sons and daughters of fathers suffering from the disease. Her nursing career, which was as much a vocation as a career, was a direct result of watching her mother endure his loss.
My father stared opaquely out the window at the three moths still circling in quivering, mindless flight.
The world in which he now spent most of his days and nights seemed to at least be a peaceful one, for which I tried to be grateful, even if “gratitude” to the merciless illness that had taken us away from each other—not quickly, as death would, but in excruciating increments of days, weeks, and months—was a hard go.
It had been painful enough to watch my father’s shame when he couldn’t remember my name. Worse still when he didn’t know me, even after I told him I was his son, Jamie. By the time my father was actively afraid of the bulky, forty-year-old man he didn’t recognize as his son—the one who spoke softly to him with filial familiarity, caressed his hand, tried to hug him, called him Dad—I realized I’d had an authentic glimpse of hell. The insidious devils that ran the place bore no resemblance to anything Biblical. Their sadism was far too subtle for mere religious mythology. They’d damned my father by siphoning away the memory of his life, taking care that he’d been aware enough to know it, and they’d damned me by forcing me to watch it happen.
The best years of my childhood had been after he and my mother divorced.
I had been ten. Everyone tiptoed around me as though my mother leaving us was supposed to be the most devastating thing imaginable, but after three solid years of increasingly escalated arguments, it was really more of a blessing. Her indifference to me had hurt less than her anger at him, which seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. On the rare occasions that my mother made me part of their marital psychodrama, it was as part of a rebuke to her husband.
“You always take his side,” she seethed. “Like when he brought that stupid turtle home. But you didn’t listen, and we know how that turned out. It’s like you’re married to him instead of me. Sometimes I think I should just go off and live by myself and let you two live your own lives together.”
My father always protested, of course, but after a while it must have seemed like an excellent idea, likely to both of them. In 1972, she did just that, and left.
I said I wanted to live with my father. Since my mother didn’t want me, for the sake of form or even spite, there was no fuss over custody. I simply stayed in our house with him and grew up there. At first, we were hesitant with each other, like two survivors of an explosion that had just levelled a city block; but in time, we both realized that our house was calm and quiet all of a sudden, the atmosphere detoxified and clear of the constant anticipation of hostility. Our spines relaxed, our jaws lost the tense set we hadn’t realized they’d adopted. We kept waiting for all of that to change for the worse, even for mourning to set in, but it never did. Since my mother was the one who initiated the separation, I could only gauge its effect on my father as the one who had been “abandoned” (a word I picked up from listening to my mother and her friends talking about women who had been left by their husbands—a word I assumed must be similarly applicable to men who had been left by their wives).
When my mother announced that she was moving to Vancouver to stay with her family “for a little while, till I get things sorted out,” I breathed a sigh of relief that it would likely be the end of the tense lunches and dinners in restaurants that had become our sole interaction on “her” day. I have no idea what she told her friends, but when neighbours and close friends of both my parents came over to check up on us (or, more accurately, me, the “abandoned” child), they were surprised to see me smiling and calm and happy in my father’s company, and under his care.
I overheard an exchange between my father and Mrs. Alban one evening when she’d come over to drop off a cake she’d baked for us. It hadn’t been my intention to eavesdrop, but when I heard my name, I paused on the stairs and crouched there, listening to what the adults were saying.
“Alice is a gadder, Peter. Some women are just like that,” Mrs. Alban said. I heard her sigh. “You’ll forgive me for speaking my mind. I don’t mean to impugn Alice, and I’ve always been fond of you both, but some women aren’t always made to be wives and mothers. I’m sure she gave it her best shot. How is Jamie doing?”
“I think he’s doing fine, Mrs. Alban. I think he misses his mother, but the two of us are doing well. Alice loves him, and I think Jamie knows that. Divorce is never easy on anyone,” he added diplomatically. “But we’re going to be okay. Alice, too, I suspect.”
“I don’t mean to intrude in a way that’s too personal,” Mrs. Alban said, “but while it’s unusual for the child to stay with the father rather than the mother, I think it’s probably a very good idea in this case.”
My father’s voice sounded stiff and formal all of a sudden. I could tell that Mrs. Alban had crossed a line without being aware of it. “Thank you, Mrs. Alban,” he said. “We think so, too.”
And that was that.
For his part, my father felt it was his duty to present both sides of the story to me, lest I harbour any ill will toward my mother later in life. He had never spoken ill of her in my presence, even when it had become obvious that divorce was inevitable. That was the point at which he stopped making excuses for her and simply let her words and actions speak for themselves. That was as judgemental of my mother as he ever got in front of me.
“Jamie,” he asked me one evening after she left, “are you angry at your mother?”
“No, Dad.”
“Are you angry at me? It’s okay if you are, you know. We can talk about it.”
“No, Dad.”
“You’re probably too young to understand what happened between your mother and I, but even if we don’t love each other the way we used to, we still love you. And that’s the important thing. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“I know, Dad. It’s okay.”
“Jamie, do you . . . do you, you know, want to see anybody about this?”
“Like who?”
“You know. Another grownup, maybe? Like a doctor?”
“No,” I repeated. “I’m not sick. I’m really okay.” And I really was okay, too. It was the last time my father suggested a psychiatrist.
Privately I did wonder if there was something wrong with me with regard to why I didn’t miss my mother more. I asked Hank about it once right after my mother left. Hank’s view was a pragmatic one, a pragmatism that belied the fact that she was only ten.
“It sucks that your mom left, Jamie,” she said kindly. “But you know, your dad is nicer than your mom. And he loves you a lot. At least you get to stay with him. You’ll get to do all kinds of cool stuff now, and never have to worry about your mom being mad at you for doing it. Also, I don’t think she really liked me that much, so I’m not sad she’s gone, either.”
Still, I worried. “Do you think it’s weird that I’m not really sad?”
She shrugged. “Nope. I think it’s weirder that your mom wanted to leave you guys. You have a nice house, and your dad is a nice person. As for me, my mom is a pain in the you-know-what. I wish she’d leave, too. I wouldn’t be sad if she did. Well, not that sad,” she qualified. “At least I’d be able to keep my hair short and let the stupid holes in my stupid ears grow over and never have to wear these stupid earrings ever again. And nobody would ever call me ‘Lucinda Jane’ again. I hate being a girl.”
“You’re not a girl to me,” I said loyally. “You’re just Hank.”
“Thanks, Jamie. You’re not a boy to me, either. You’re just . . .” She paused, thinking it over. “Well, just you.”
“Thanks, Hank.”
When I was thirteen, we left the Ottawa and moved to Toronto because my father got a better job. I missed Hank terribly. We wrote to each other every week and spoke on the phone sometimes late at night when the rates were low. Hank wasn’t allowed to rack up long-distance charges so I always called her. My father understood the importance of our bond and encouraged it.
At fourteen, I experienced a growth spurt. My body filled out with new muscle, yielding unfamiliar strength. All traces of the willowy androgyny of my childhood vanished behind a wall of sinew in the space of a year, and I grew five inches, topping out at a solid six-one.
For the first time in my fourteen years, I was the physical superior of all the boys I knew. There was no more bullying from anyone, and there was something in its place: complete equanimity.
My new height and weight caught the attention of the various coaches at my high school. I was encouraged to try out for sports—hockey, football, even wrestling. I resisted at first, of course. None of the experiences I’d had with boys my own age up to then had inclined me toward trust, let alone affection.
But at the coaches’ insistence, I tried out for all three. While I had no natural dexterity or ability in either hockey or football, neither the other boys on the team, nor the ones trying out seemed to find anything particularly unusual, let alone abuse-worthy, in my competing on their level. My new physicality seemed to be currency enough; they didn’t seem to sense anything different about me the way the boys back home in Ottawa had when I was younger and frailer. If my new physical imposition was my camouflage, it was a perfect illusion. It had erased any traces of who or what I had been. This new Jamie Browning could go anywhere, and did. I finally settled on wrestling. The sport suited my new strength and I responded to the rigours of the training regimen. Best of all, the sport was the perfect conduit for any pent-up aggression I had accumulated over the years. Even if no one I wrestled had any idea who Jamie Browning had been prior to this transformation, they felt the full force of it when I had them pinned under me on the mat.
After graduating from university I became an English teacher at a private school outside of Toronto. I loved teaching and took to it with a naturalness that surprised everyone who knew me, except my father who told me that he’d always envisioned me as a teacher of some kind.
I married a young woman named Ame Millbrook, with whom I’d fallen in love my final year at the University of Toronto. She had beautiful shoulder-length red hair and skin like the inside of a peony petal.
Ame had moved into the Knox College residence after three years of living with two roommates in an apartment on Palmerston Avenue, not far from the university, in the Annex. She had broken up with her boyfriend that summer and had wanted to make a complete break from her previous life while she finished up her history studies. After she received her B.A., she planned to take a year off, she said, to travel.
I swam laps at Hart House every morning before breakfast, and Ame was an early riser so she could study, so we were both usually the first people at breakfast in the dining hall. Early morning small talk at breakfast eventually led to longer talks at lunch and dinner, which eventually led to me working up the courage to ask Ame Millbrook out on a date.
Over Chianti and pasta puttanesca at a cheap Italian restaurant near the campus, we each discovered that neither of us was very ready to trust when it came to relationships. Ame had been badly hurt after discovering that her boyfriend had been cheating on her for six months before they broke up. For my part, it appeared that my parents’ divorce and my mother’s departure had affected me more than I’d thought.
It struck me later as ironic that our very fragility on the topic was the common bond we shared, and that it proved to be the source of our courage to yield to the feelings we were each clearly developing for each other; love in the form of emotional détente.
The first night she was nude in my arms, I marvelled at the contrast of her slender whiteness against my own darker skin. Her delicacy against my bulk was shockingly erotic for both of us. In the darkness of the bedroom, I would wrap my arms around her back, cradling it, my back bowed, my weight on my elbows, my hands cupped her shoulder blades as I thrust, both of us slick with sweat. Making love to Ame was a sublime, sensual ritual pas-de-deux. I hadn’t been a virgin when I met Ame, not by any stretch of the imagination, but somehow, with her, I felt more myself than I ever had.
When I was on top of her, feeling her body react to every movement, I felt somehow as though the act was more than just sex. If I’d believed in souls, I would have said I felt—in my soul—that I was securing the final lock on the door between my childhood and my manhood.
I had no idea why this should be so important to me, nor did I question it any more than I had questioned how this sense of closure was connected to the recurring dreams I’d had off and on since I was nine years old—dreams of a girl in an old-fashioned dress who seemed to grow alongside me into womanhood as I grew into young manhood. The girl appeared in different incarnations in different years, always roughly matching my own chronological age, always the same girl in a sequence of old-fashioned dresses and hairstyles, but always the same girl.
The night Ame and I got engaged was the last night I dreamed of this girl, now in every sense of the word a mysterious and beguiling young woman, even just in dreams.
In that last dream, she stood on some sort of rocky beach staring out across the water at a point in the distance. When the woman slowly turned her head away from whatever it was she was observing and met my eyes, I knew she recognized me. In the dream, she knew me. She smiled at me with a knowing that was somehow terrible.
I woke with a jolt, feeling as though I had fallen out of the sky onto the bed. The abrupt movement woke Ame. She murmured comforting words, then took me in her arms and held me until my heartbeat returned to a normal cadence and we both slept, with me dreamless at last.
Naturally, I’d asked Hank to be my best man. It was the right thing to do, and besides, I’d promised.
She’d come out as a very butch lesbian in her second year at Carleton University to no one’s surprise, least of all mine.
Hank had called me in Toronto that year and asked if she could take the train up from Ottawa and stay over, because she had something important to tell me. In my dorm room at East House in Knox College, she’d told me that she was gay, and in love with a woman named Cosima, a journalism major. She told me that her life of trying to be what everyone had wanted her to be—a girl named Lucinda Jane—had almost killed her, literally as well as figuratively: she had seriously contemplated suicide when she was sixteen.
“I had the razor blades in the bottom of my sweater drawer. I kept them there, secret. No one knew. Men’s razors,” she said with a hint of something like pride, or contempt. It was hard to tell which. “Not those fucking pink lady razors.”
I was horrified. “Why didn’t you tell me, Hank? Jesus. All those times we spoke on the phone long-distance. You could have told me. I would have been on the next bus . . .” I trailed off, unable to contemplate what her suicide would have meant. A world without Hank in it was literally incomprehensible to me. “Why? How could you keep something like that to yourself?”
She sighed. “I couldn’t, Jamie. I couldn’t admit what I was feeling, not even to myself. Telling you would have just made it real, and I wasn’t ready for any of it to be real.”
Hank confessed that she had finally come to terms with the fact that, in an effort to please everyone else, she hadn’t succeeded in pleasing anyone, least of all herself. Her earnestness had moved me, but the news couldn’t have been less of a surprise, or less relevant to our friendship, and I told her just that as I held her tight.
Later, as we lay on the floor head to head, very drunk on Jägermeister, staring up at the swirling ceiling of my dorm room, she said she had something to tell me.
“What, Hank?”
“I fucking love you, Jamie.” I fuggen lovezu
“Me, too, Hank. I love you, too.”
“I wish you were my brother.”
“I wish you were my brother.” I started to giggle. “No, I mean, I wish you were my sister.”
“Not me,” she said with drunken solemnity. “I don’t want to be anyone’s sister. I wish I was your brother, too.”
“You are, Hank.” Buffeted on the waves of Jäger, it made sense. “You are my brother. Tell you what—if I ever get married, you can be my best man, okay?”
“You getting married? To who? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Now we were both giggling. “No,” I said, nearly choking. “I’m not getting married. But . . . when.”
“And you want me to be your best man? Wow.”
The ceiling continued to spin. “Yup. I do.”
Hank paused, then reached for my hand, squeezing it tightly. “Bro,” she said.
The next morning, we weren’t sure which of us had passed out first, but we realized two things through the haze of agony: We each had the worst hangovers of our lives. And neither of us could remember having been happier.
In the years since graduation, Hank, having eschewed law school, had become a very successful landscape gardener.
During her undergrad, she had spent her summers planting trees up north and working on outdoor landscaping crews in the city. In the process, she had discovered that she loved the work and, more importantly, that she had a natural affinity for the soil.
Before opening her own small firm in Ottawa, she had worked on various crews for other landscaping companies, first on summer vacations, then full-time upon graduation. She found that her communion with soil and seed was instinctive and unfailingly accurate. Her various employers noticed that she was a hard worker who put in long hours in the sun without complaining. They also noticed that she took an effortless leadership role with the crews, which were usually comprised of men, and that those men accepted her leadership just as effortlessly. Her supervisor, Sid, regularly slapped her on the back and joked that she was “just one of the guys” and “practically a man—and I mean that in a good way, so don’t go gettin’ all militant dykey on me now, eh?”
Hank always assured him she understood exactly what he meant, and laughed right along with him. Sid was still laughing right up until the moment Hank handed in her notice and quit to start her own competing landscaping business. She took two of the company’s best workers on the crew with her and, in the process, snapped up a plum condominium maintenance contract her former employers had been too lazy to bother formally renewing with the condo board. Sid had been furious. He’d called her a thieving dyke and promised her he’d blackball her so she’d never get another landscaping job in the city as long as he had breath in his body.
“Do your worst, Sid,” Hank said, saluting him as she walked out of the office for the last time. “You’re practically a man. And I mean that in a good way.”
Ame became less of a free spirit once we were actually engaged, and she wasn’t remotely pleased at the idea of a lesbian best man standing next to her fiancé at the end of the aisle in church. When she told me her parents and their friends would be horrified at the idea of a lesbian in their daughter’s wedding party, I suggested we elope or marry at City Hall, if she chose, or that her parents stay home. But if we were going to marry in a church, Hank would be my best man.
And so Hank was my best man. She was resplendent in a tuxedo that matched mine, her crew cut shining beneath a fresh coat of Brylcreem.
My mother, who flew in from Vancouver, with her second facelift and her third—very rich—husband, was the only person at the reception who called Hank “Lucinda Jane,” which Cosima, who’d come as Hank’s date, found hilarious.
Before ducking out of the reception, my mother kissed me on both cheeks and gave me a brittle hug.
“I haven’t been much of a mother to you all these years, Jamie,” my mother said. “I’m sorry about that. I’ve often regretted not being there. I didn’t regret leaving, because I had to find myself. But I regret leaving you. I’ve always loved you, though, son. I hope you and Ame will be very happy together.”
I didn’t believe a word of it, but I reached out and kissed her cheek. She stiffened in my arms, but allowed me to kiss her nonetheless, performing the traditional ritual homage to the normal mother and son relationship we’d never had.
“Thank you, Mom,” I said as sincerely as I could. “And thank you for coming. You, too, Stan,” I added for my second stepfather’s benefit. “It means a lot.”
My mother, who had studiously avoided my father throughout the service, pressed an envelope into my hand. “A little something for the honeymoon,” she said. “I know it’s not much, but it made sense to give this to you rather than another silly wedding gift you’re just going to throw away, anyway.”
When I opened the envelope, it contained a cheque for ten thousand dollars. I briefly thought of tearing it up, but I knew it would be an empty gesture, and ten thousand dollars was ten thousand dollars. If I genuinely didn’t bear my mother ill will for having left us, giving my father and me a chance at a happy life together—and I didn’t—it seemed hypocritical to throw her gift back in her face.
Ame and I had two good years together before I realized I had ignored the signs that had manifested themselves after we’d gotten engaged, and that I’d married a woman very much like my mother.
We divorced, much more acrimoniously than my own parents. Unlike the departure of my mother, however, the departure of my wife shook me to the core. Through Ame I thought I’d caught a glimpse of what a real marriage could be like, and I discovered that I’d idealized it much more than I’d ever dreamed. And perhaps I did catch that glimpse of what it could be like, but you can’t build a life together on a glimpse of anything so amorphous.
After my divorce, I moved back in with my father. He protested, of course, citing my youth and my new eligibility, urging me to “get back on that horse” and try again with a new girl.
“I feel guilty,” my father confessed, a bit shamefaced. “I believe that your mother and I were a fearful example of marital bliss for you.”
“It wasn’t you, Dad,” I said. “You were a great father to me. I couldn’t have asked for a better example of how to be a husband.”
“For all the good it did me,” he said ruefully. “Look at me. I’m an old man with no wife.” He laughed, but there wasn’t a lot of regret in that laughter. “No wife, no life.”
“Sometimes things just don’t work out the way we want them to, Dad.” I shrugged. “It happens. As far as I’m concerned, Mom threw away the best thing that ever happened to her. She was a gadder. I don’t think she knew what she wanted.”
“What did you say?” He sounded shocked, but then he laughed out loud. “Good Lord, Jameson. Where on earth did you hear that word?”
“Something I heard Mrs. Alban say one night when you and she were talking, when I was a kid. After Mom left. She said Mom was ‘a gadder.’ I didn’t know what she meant at the time. At first I thought she said ‘gander.’ I thought that was funny. But you know, I think Mrs. Alban was right. Mom didn’t leave you for another man, she left us because she didn’t like herself very much and she thought that by leaving us, she could figure out why.”
“I don’t think she ever did,” my father said. “Poor Alice.”
“And by the way, you may not have a wife, but you do have a life. So don’t say that. And you have a son who loves you more than anything.”
“That I do,” he said gently. “That I do, Jamie. And I’m so proud of you. But I still don’t want you to move in with me. I’m far too old, and you’ve gotten far too bossy.”
By the time I moved in with him in May of that year, I had been concerned for some time that things were not entirely right with my father.
It had started off with small things, him repeating himself in conversation with no subsequent memory of having just said what he’d said. At first, he thought I was teasing him when I told him I’d just responded to that very statement a few minutes earlier. When he realized I was genuinely startled, he rubbed his eyes and said, “Well, I guess I’m just getting old-timers.”
We both laughed at that. For my part, my laughter was genuine, but my father’s carried a trace of something that caused me to look twice. By the second or third time it happened, I was the only one laughing. My father’s face had taken on a haunted aspect.
In the weeks and months that followed, my father’s memory began to slip slowly, but with what I now realize had been inexorable, murderous determination.
Frequently he would ask me to speak more slowly, though I habitually spoke more slowly than he did. He became enraged at the sound of a radio, or a television, telling me that it was impossible for him to think with all the noise in the house. His confusion became constant, though he did his best to hide it from me. For a while, he managed to do so successfully. But then eventually it became impossible to hide. I begged him to see a doctor about it, but he was adamantly opposed to what he called “a lot of fuss over just getting old.”
“This is my house,” he shouted. “This is why I didn’t want you to move in with me. I hate all the fussing!” Then, my father, whom I’d never heard swear a day in his life said, “It’s one of the reasons I was so glad your bitch of a mother moved the fuck out of that bastard house in Ottawa. Fucking cold bitch.”
I was shocked. “Dad?” I reached out to touch him, but he slapped my hand away. “Dad, you’re not yourself. This isn’t how you talk. This isn’t the language you use. You need to see someone. You’re scaring me.”
“What? WHAT? What does everyone want from me? You and that bitch of a mother of yours! Pushy, pushy, pushy! Just leave me alone so I can get ready for work, damn you! I’m going to be late for the office. It’s late!”
It was eleven at night. I stared at him with blank horror, then said the only words that came to mind: “Dad, you’re retired. You don’t have to get ready for work. Your work is done. And it’s late at night.” I pointed to the grandfather clock against the wall. “Look, Dad. It’s eleven.”
My father turned and left the room. I heard his bedroom door slam behind him. When I knocked fifteen minutes later, there was no answer. I pushed it open quietly, taking care not to startle him. My father had fallen asleep across his bed, fully clothed. Only when I pulled a blanket over him did I notice that he was wearing a nylon windbreaker next to his skin, underneath his button-down plaid Viyella sport shirt, and rubber snow galoshes on his feet. Careful not to wake him, I removed the galoshes and put them away in the hall closet.
We tiptoed around each other all the next day in a way we had not since my mother had walked out thirty-odd years before. That evening I was unable to bear the tension any longer and asked my father why he had been so quiet all day.
At first he denied that he had been unusually quiet. He denied it brusquely, but then with increased desperation. When he finally confessed to me that he was afraid to speak because he didn’t trust his ability to use the right words to convey what he meant, he broke down and wept tears that sounded like they’d been cut out of his throat with an awl.
The next morning, we made an appointment with Dr. O’Neill, my father’s longtime physician, for a full battery of tests. When the results came back, they were exactly what both of us dreaded: mid-stage, progressive Alzheimer’s.
“Well,” said my father. “Well. My God.”
“This is treatable, though, Dr. O’Neill, isn’t it?” I was desperate for him to tell me it was, even though everything I had already read on the topic had indicated it wasn’t. I’d never wanted more to be wrong about something in my life. “What’s the treatment? What do we do? How do we beat this?”
Dr. O’Neill looked pained. “Well, those are two questions, Jamie, I’m sorry to say. For treatment, I’m going to prescribe memantine hydrochloride—Ebixa, it’s called. It’s an NMDA receptor antagonist, which means it blocks some of the chemicals in the brain that trigger the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. It’ll help with the memory loss and the confusion. But it’s a treatment, not a cure. It’s important that you know that. We’ll start with twenty milligrams a day—two doses of ten milligrams twice a day. He can take them with or without food, but they have to be swallowed. He can’t chew them. It’s very important that he swallow them.”
My father muttered something under his breath.
“What did you say, Dad? I’m sorry, we didn’t hear you.”
My father spoke sharply this time. “I said, ‘Stop talking about me as though I’m not here.’ I’m an old man with an illness, not a child. I’m still your father, Jameson. I’m still an adult.”
“I’m sorry, Peter, of course you’re right,” Dr. O’Neill said. “Please forgive me. That was very insensitive of us.”
“Don’t condescend to me, either, Dr. O’Neill. Please. I sincerely mean no disrespect, but this is something I’m facing. I need to be spoken to clearly and honestly about it.”
“Will the drugs . . . will they cure him?” I couldn’t stop asking, even though the doctor had already said no. I wanted there do be a different answer. At that moment, I believed that by asking it again, perhaps there was one the doctor hadn’t thought of. “I mean, will they cure my dad?”
Dr. O’Neill took a deep breath. “No, Jamie, they won’t. Your father has expressed an understandable desire that I not sugarcoat this for either of you, so I won’t. There is no cure for this particular disease. It can be managed with drugs, possibly for a long time. But after a certain point . . .”
he trailed off. “Well, after a certain point your lives will be very different than they are now. There will be any number of options at that point. We can discuss them as the situation develops.”
My father’s laugh was a sharp, dry bark. “I think you mean deteriorates, Dr. O’Neill. You should have been an airline pilot, sir. I could easily picture you addressing the passengers of a perpendicular 747 about to crash nose-first into the Atlantic. ‘Please listen for further announcements as the situation develops.’”
Dr. O’Neill smiled thinly, but with what appeared to be sincere sadness. He had been my father’s doctor for ten extraordinarily healthy years. “I’m sorry, Peter,” he said. “I wish there was a better prognosis. But staying as positive as possible is essential.”
“I’ll work on that, Dr. O’Neill,” my father said dryly. “I promise I’ll work at staying positive.”
My father’s downward progression was swift, likely swifter than any of the three of us expected it would be when we left the office that day.
He barely slept at night. Instead, he roamed the house, opening drawers and cupboards and upending the contents. After a while, I stopped turning on the burglar alarm because he set it off every night past midnight when he dropped cutlery and plates on the floor, convinced that it was morning, and I was fifteen years old, and he had to cook me breakfast before I went to wrestling practice.
He was also occasionally convinced that he and my mother were still married, and that we were all living in the old house in Ottawa, and it was still the early 1970s.
He furrowed his brow. “What was the name of that little girl you used to play with, Jamie? What was her name?” Before his illness, my father remembered every detail of my childhood with a sense of recall that was almost eidetic.
“You mean Hank, Dad? Are you talking about Hank?”
He thought about it. “No, that wasn’t her name. That’s a boy’s name, anyway. It was something else. What was her name? You used to spend a lot of time together playing in your room. Come on, damn it. You remember.”
“Well, her real name was Lucinda, but no one called her that except Mom. Well, and Hank’s mother—she never called her Hank. She was my best friend, remember? She came to my wedding. She was my best man.”
He mulled this over. “Lucinda.” He tasted the word, closing his eyes, trying to place it in some sort of recollective context. “No, that wasn’t her name. I’m sure of it. Damn it. Some other girl.”
“Maybe, Dad,” I lied. “I had a lot of friends. You’re probably thinking of someone else.
I kept a full schedule of classes as long as I possibly could; the house was paid for, I was working, and his savings paid enough for homecare several times a week, but even the rotating home assistance workers who came to help with my father finally admitted that yes, he needed to be watched more than even they and I could manage. But still, I resisted their suggestion of alternate living arrangements for my father.
That remained the case until the rainy Thursday night I got the call from the police telling me they had picked up my father, who had almost been killed wandering in traffic in his pajamas on the Leaside Bridge. When the police arrived, he was stumbling towards the lower railings of the bridge with its deadly forty-five-metre plunge.
The officers had been able to divert traffic long enough to safely rescue him, then calm him down enough to get him into the back of a cruiser. They had been able to identify him by the plastic identification bracelet I’d insisted he wear, one of the few battles regarding his care that he’d given in to with no blowback. The bracelet had his name, our address, and my cell phone number. I was almost hysterical on the telephone, but the female officer’s voice at the other end seemed accustomed to dealing with hysterical relatives and soothing them. Mr. Browning was safe and at the station, she told me kindly. He’d said he was hungry, so they’d given him a sandwich—was that all right?
And he was asking that his daughter, Amanda, pick him up at the station and take him home.
When I arrived at the No. 53 Division police station, my father was docile but uncomprehending. He asked me who I was. When I told him, he said he didn’t have a son, he had a daughter and her name was Amanda.
“He doesn’t have a daughter,” I explained to the two constables who had brought my father to the front desk so they could sign him out. “He lives with me. I’m his son. He has Alzheimer’s. Aside from the actual disease symptoms, one of the side effects of the drugs he’s on is hallucinations and sleep disturbance.”
The younger of the two constables looked hard at me. “Who do you think he’s asking for? He sounds pretty specific. Do you have a sister, maybe?”
“I’m an only child, officer. I don’t have any sisters.”
“Could he be asking about his nurses, maybe?”
“His nurses—pardon me, his ex-nurses, because I’m going to fire whichever one left him alone long enough for him to get out of the house, then didn’t call me immediately—are named Beth-Anne and Florence. I don’t know any Amanda. We don’t know any Amanda,” I corrected. “We don’t.”
The older of the two police officers seemed to intuit the situation more clearly than his colleague, whether by professional or personal experience. He looked at me with a mixture of pity and resignation that led me to believe that he’d seen this before, maybe even up close.
“Mr. Browning,” he said. “If you could just step over here and fill out these forms, we can release your dad back into your custody and you can take him home. Please take care of him. At his stage of the illness, he could hurt himself badly—even hurt other people. I don’t know what he was doing on that bridge, but I do know that it’s always been a magnet for suicides.”
“My father would never kill himself,” I said automatically. “He’s not like that.”
The monstrous enormity of that lie shamed me even as I verbalized it. Of course he’d kill himself. How many times since the diagnosis had my previously happy father wept in his despair and said he didn’t want to wind up as some sort of raving vegetable, dependent on others for everything from feeding him to bathing him to helping him use the toilet? How many times had he slyly asked me (forgetting that he’d already the question a dozen times before) what would happen if the pills he was supposed to swallow were chewed instead?
But I still wasn’t prepared to process the notion of my father trying to kill himself by jumping to his death.
“Either way” the officer said. “He’s going to need better care, Mr. Browning. Much better than the care he has right now. He could have been killed tonight. I’m not faulting you, sir. This is one of the hardest things anyone has to go through—for both of you, really, in different ways. You only get one dad in this lifetime. Like I said, take care of him.”
“I know that,” I said. “Believe me, I know it.”
I felt my father pluck the sleeve of my raincoat. He reached out and caressed the back of my head, the same way he’d done a thousand times when I was a little boy, under the covers in the dim glow of my nightlight.
“You’ve cut your hair, Amanda,” he said dreamily. “You had the loveliest dark brown hair. Just like your mother.”
“I’m Jamie, Daddy,” I replied, fighting back tears. “I’m your son. You don’t have a daughter. There’s no Amanda. There never has been. Please, Daddy, stay with me just a little bit longer. Just at least until we can get home and I can call someone to help us. Please, please, please. Just a bit longer.”
He sighed ruefully. “You should have waited for me on the bridge, Amanda,” he said. “I saw you. I was almost all the way across the road. I was almost there.”
That night marked the end of my father as I’d known him. When I got him home, I gave him his medicine and put him to bed. I pulled the blanket up to his chest and tucked it in so he’d be warm enough. He looked up at me from the pillow.
“Jamie,” he said in an old man’s tentative, tremulous voice. “Would you stay here with me for a little while? Just until I fall asleep? I’m so scared.”
“Of course, Dad. Of course I will. Don’t be scared. I’m here.” I climbed onto the bed and lay down beside him. I put my arm around his shoulders and held him tenderly. In a very short time he was fast asleep in my arms, but I didn’t sleep at all that night, even after I’d left his room and gone into the living room and opened the bottle of Canadian Club I’d been given back when Ame and I were still married, but had never touched.
The next day, I brought Dad to the MacNeil Institute, the best private residential facility for Alzheimer’s patients in Toronto I could afford. Even today I remember how preternaturally, cruelly bright that sunlight in the parking lot was to my dry, red eyes and how much it stung as we laboriously made our way up the ramp to the front door.
When my father realized I was leaving him there, he cried and pleaded, telling me he didn’t want to stay there; he wanted to go home with me.
Of all of the crucifying ordeals my father and I had endured together since his diagnosis, leaving him here, while he begged like a child for me not to abandon him, was first one I had grave doubts about my being able to survive.
And then, at the most desperate moment, like an angel of light, Nurse Ardelia Jackson appeared from behind the swinging doors leading to the locked ward corridor and came over to us.
Without saying anything to me, she linked my father’s arm lightly in hers. “There now, Peter,” she comfortingly. “What’s all this fuss? Everything is fine. It’ll be all right, you’ll see. Come along now and take a walk with me. Jamie can come along in a bit. Let’s get to know each other a little bit, shall we? There now. It’s all right. We’ll just stroll.”
My father calmed at once. It was as though Nurse Jackson had drawn the terror from him like yarrow. As they walked away together down the corridor towards his new home, the place where he would spend the final stages of his life, my father turned back just once. “Jamie,” he said. “You go on home, son. I’m going to walk for a bit.”
Though my heart was utterly breaking, I still noted with joy that my father had called me Jamie, not any other name. He knew me again. How long he would know me, I wasn’t sure.
But he knew me then, and I knew he was aware that he was saying goodbye.
That was three years ago. In the time between that day and today, my father slipped entirely into the hazy, oblique world of his illness.
I visited him at the MacNeil Institute every day, usually after classes, but occasionally also in the morning, before school started.
Then, late one black November night, my world changed once again.
I was driving home from school after staying behind to work with my student actors on the school’s production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. I had been teaching the play at the same time the students were acting in it. That afternoon in class, there had been a rousing discussion about small-town sexual hypocrisy and the roiling passions locked away beneath Salem’s rigorous façade of pious New England propriety. As a teacher, I had been quietly proud to see that the passion I had been able to get out of my students that afternoon in class had carried through to that night’s rehearsal.
It had been raining all day, an early-winter drizzle that began to freeze as evening fell. After sundown, the temperature had steadily dropped until the cold and wet turned the roads and highways slick and black and slippery as wet glass.
In my mind, I had been replaying the scene near the end of the play when Jeff Renwick, who was playing John Proctor, had delivered Proctor’s wrenching soliloquy about losing the dignity of his name by confessing to witchcraft when so many of his friends had gone to the gallows rather than besmirch their own with a false confession.
“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”
When he had finished, I had tears in my eyes. And I was not the only one in the auditorium who did. The applause had begun slowly, but it reached a crescendo that echoed through the rehearsal auditorium and out into the corridor.
I was smiling at the memory and tapping my fingers on the steering wheel when my car was abruptly sideswiped by a drunken lawyer making an illegal left-hand turn. The impact sent me crashing into a guardrail, or so I was told later.
When I woke from the coma in traction three days later, the attending physician asked me if I knew who I was, or where I was.
My first words to him were, “Leave me my name.”
I spent almost six months in hospital recovering from a variety of injuries, including a mild brain trauma that nonetheless left me unable to focus for long periods of time. This particular injury, of all the damage I sustained, effectively ended my teaching career.
On the upside, between the insurance and the money the lawyer’s family paid me to avoid me suing them for everything they had, I found myself with more money than I’d ever seen in my life. Certainly it was enough to ensure my father’s continued care at the MacNeil Institute. It was also enough money for me to fulfill a dream I’d cherished ever since my divorce: the dream of leaving the city and all its painful memories. I didn’t want to be more than a half-day’s drive from the MacNeil Institute as long as my father was alive, but as it now stood, I was marking time. I couldn’t teach and I was too young for anything resembling a retirement.
So when I came across the advertisement in the Globe & Mail for the sale of a turn-of-the-century estate on a private island in Georgian Bay in excellent repair—suitable for a family or as an income property/guesthouse—for a price that was a virtual steal, I did something I’d never done in my entire dogmatically practical, safe, honourable life: I bought the house, sight unseen.
The very act of cutting the cheque felt almost pornographic in its decadence, but it was that very sense of abandon that allowed me to envision a life beyond the grim borders of the one in which I found myself. The point was, I had never done anything like that in my life, and I now could.
On the telephone, when I’d called to tell Hank that I’d bought the house, she’d asked me if perhaps its impulsive purchase was another symptom of the brain injury.
I’d laughed and replied, “No, it’s a symptom of having enough money to afford to be able to make mistakes, even big ones. And buying this house—which has a name, by the way, “Wild Fell”—on a crazy impulse is the first fun I’ve had in years.”
I told her about my plans to turn it into a guesthouse, which sounded more than ever like a lark when I related it over the telephone. Hank must have sensed something uncertain in my voice, because she waited till I was finished talking, then asked me the sort of to-the-point question in which she specialized.
“How’re you doing, Jamie? Really, though. I don’t want to hear bullshit from you. How’re you feeling about all of this? Not in general, I mean, but right now, at this moment?”
“Right now, at this moment, I feel guilty, frankly,” I told her. “But at the same time, I feel excited, which probably makes me feel even guiltier. I really feel like I needed some distance from everything—the divorce, Dad’s diagnosis, the accident. Buying this house and thinking of turning it into a summer bed and breakfast, or guesthouse, might just be a very expensive pipe dream. But I wanted to forget about it all, at least for a while. Does that make sense to you? Do you think I’m crazy?”
Hank snorted. “I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget that I was born a girl named Lucinda. What do you think? And yes, of course I understand what you’re saying. And I agree with you. I’ve never seen anyone love his father as much as you love yours, Jamie. And it’s not like you’re leaving the country. You’ll be three, maybe four hours away from him. That’s nothing. If he needs you, or if you feel like you need to see him, we’ll just get in the car and drive.”
“Is it really that simple? That’s sort of what Nurse Jackson has said, too.”
“Yes, Jamie, it’s really that simple.”
“Then why do I feel sick inside about this?”
She laughed at that. “Because you are crazy, Jamie. Just not for the reasons you think you are.” That voice with its rawboned, rational practicality could soothe and calm me like no other.
I asked Hank again, “Do you think I’m crazy? For buying Wild Fell?”
She paused. I pictured her rubbing her chin as she did when she pondered. “First off, no, I don’t think you’re remotely crazy. Buying it, especially sight-unseen, might not necessarily have been my first choice when you came into all that money. Me, I might have done some travelling—”
I interrupted her, a bit more brusquely than I might have wanted to. “You know why I can’t leave the country.”
“As I was saying,” Hank said patiently. “Whatever I might have done, I’m not you. You took care of your responsibilities with it. You can’t teach right now because of your injury, and you don’t want to sit around. All of which is a very long and involved way of saying, no, I don’t think you’re crazy for buying . . .
what’s it called . . . ?”
“Wild Fell.”
“What the hell kind of a name for a cottage is that? What does that even mean?”
“‘Fell’ has at least two meanings,” I said. The faintly pompous, lecturing inflection that had become second nature to me after all those years of teaching embarrassed me. It sometimes manifested itself without warning, especially when I felt challenged, as I now did by Hank. “As an adjective, it means ‘of terrible evil or ferocity.’ But as a noun—which is how I believe it’s used in this case—it refers to a hill, or a stretch of high moorland. Alexander Blackmore, the politician who bought the island and built the house in the early-1800s, came to Canada from Cornwall. Unlike most of the islands in the Georgian Bay region, which are flat, this one actually has a rise, like a cliff. It slopes, too. Mrs. Fowler the real estate agent in Alvina, the nearest town, told me was that Mr. Blackmore had been struck by the romantic notion that it reminded him of the moors of his childhood, except it was right in the middle of a Canadian lake. Hence, the ‘wild’ part. He named the island after himself, and named the house ‘Wild Fell’ in a sort of romanticized homage to his roots.”
“All this fuss over a cottage,” Hank mused.
“This is more than a cottage,” I said. “You’ll understand what I mean when you see it.”
“You haven’t seen it,” Hank said dryly. “Did he live there alone?”
“Not from what I understand,” I said. “He raised a family there. He had a wife and two children—a son and a daughter.”
Hank seemed more curious now. “What happened to them? Who sold the house? Grandchildren? Great-grandchildren?”
“I don’t know what happened to the Blackmore children,” I said. “Mrs. Fowler didn’t say. The house passed from the Blackmore family in Canada to cousins in England who apparently didn’t want the bother of its upkeep, or the expense. According to Mrs. Fowler, no one has lived in it for over fifty years.”
“Jesus, Jamie, are you kidding? Fifty years? The place is going to be a wreck! What were you thinking?”
“Yeah, I thought that, too,” I said. “But they included a home inspection. The results were sort of a surprise.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the house doesn’t seem to have aged.”
She grunted. “Oh, bullshit. You’ve been totally had, Jamie. Thank God you can afford it.”
“No, really,” I insisted. “Some fire damage to the exterior of one of the wings, and the usual wear and tear. But other than that, it’s in remarkable shape. I read the report, Hank. And for the price I paid for the houswould have been a fool not to buy it.”
“‘Remarkable shape,’” Hank mimicked. “Jesus. I hope Alvina has a decent hotel for you to stay in once you see this dilapidated wreck.”
“You’re a landscaper, Hank,” I said. “If it’s broken, you can fix it, right? You can do anything.”
Now it was Hank’s turn to sound professorial. “I landscape outside, Jamie,” she said. “I make award-winning landscapes out of nothing. If you need a garden outside this albatross of a house of yours, I can probably do it. But fixing up an uninhabited wreck . . .” Hank trailed off. “Jesus Christ.”
“Remember what you said,” I teased her. “If it doesn’t work out, I can just turn around and go home.”
All that was left was for me to close up my dad’s house, pack, and leave. I’d briefly thought of selling it, but it was paid up and I favoured the idea of having it to come home to when I visited.
First, though, I had to see him and ask his blessing on my departure, or his forgiveness, even if I knew he couldn’t rightly give it. And yet, still, here I was in his room, my suitcases stacked in the hall, trying to say goodbye.
I knelt down next to my father’s wheelchair and took his hand in mine. It felt as delicate and dry as a bird’s claw. The skin seemed almost translucent, pale veins rising like frozen blue streams in the midst of snow.
“Dad, can you hear me? You know I’m here. I know you know.” I leaned my cheek against his shoulder, feeling the soft red cashmere against my skin. Even in this awful place, with all its olfactory assaults, I still smelled the sweet scent of my father on the sweater. “Daddy? It’s me, Jamie. It’s your son. I’m going away for a little while. I’ll be back soon to see you, I promise. I swear it. I’m going to go fix up a house. I’m going to turn it into a guesthouse. Maybe you can come and stay with me once it’s done.” I winced. I hated the sound of my own lie, and I hated how quickly it had come to me. It served to underscore how far away my father was, that I could say almost anything to him and not elicit a reaction.
At that exact moment, I missed the entirety of Peter Browning so much that I felt my heart would shatter from the sheer pressure of the loss.
My father remained silent, his eyes fixed on the window out of which the moths had once flown. In the soft light, he looked younger than his seventy-five years. The disease hadn’t robbed him of the aspect of benevolence that was as germane to his face as the planes of skin and bone. While many of the patients at the MacNeil Institute habitually wore looks of confusion, or vacancy, or terror, my father had acquired the beatific patina of an ancient saint in a nineteenth-century Spanish fresco.
“Ah, Jesus,” I said. “I feel guilty about leaving. Really, really guilty.”
“I know you do,” Nurse Jackson said. “I understand that. But you shouldn’t. He’d want you to live. And you’ll be back for regular visits. We’ll stay in touch. I’ll take good care of your Dad, I promise.”
“Do you think he knows I’m going away?”
Nurse Jackson frowned at me. She had a remarkable frown, one that made me feel like I was a bad five-year-old who wasn’t paying attention.
“Stop saying you’re ‘going away,’ Jamie,” she said crisply. “If you keep saying it, it’ll become real to you, and you’ll be as lost as your father, in your own way. You’re not ‘going away’ from him. You bought a cottage on an island up north. Think of it that way. You’re going to make it into something. You’re not leaving home. You’ll be back. Your home is right here, in your father’s heart. You’re moving to a different spot on that long thread connecting you.”
“The house is pretty big to be a called a cottage.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, more grateful to her for her blessing in lieu of my father’s than I trusted myself able to express. “A white elephant, more likely. I probably should have used the insurance money from my accident on something else. Probably too good to be true.”
“Oh, pish-tosh.” Nurse Jackson waved away my words with a flick of her plump, soft hands. “It’ll be an adventure. If your father weren’t there, he’d be in that car with you. Where is it again? The town, I mean? I used to have family up in County Grey.”
“Alvina.”
“Hmmm, don’t know it. Not that that means anything. I never get away from here. Well, not nearly enough, anyway.”
I leaned down and kissed my father’s cheek. “Goodbye, Dad. I’ll see you very soon. I promise. I’ll come back to see you in a few weeks. I’ll bring pictures of the house for you to see, after we’ve cleaned it up. It’ll be so beautiful, you’ll see. You’ll be proud of me.”
“He’s already proud of you, Jamie,” Nurse Jackson said. “You know he is. Now, you go and do your work. Life is for the living. It’s what your dad would want—does want,” she corrected herself. “Does want.”
“Thank you, Ardelia.” I handed her a piece of paper. “You already have my cell phone number. I’ll have the phone with me. My email address will be the same, obviously. But in case anything happens, or if you can’t get through, here’s the number of the real estate agency in Alvina and their address. They’ll be able to get in touch with me in case Dad . . . well, in case of any sort of emergency.”
Impulsively, I reached for Nurse Jackson and kissed her on the cheek. Then I hugged her. When I stepped shyly away, she took both of my hands in hers, as gently as I had just taken my father’s.
“You’re a good man, Jamie Browning,” she said tenderly. “You’re a good boy. You’re a good son. Your father is a lucky man. You just go on.” She let go of one of my hands and reached for my father’s. She held both of our hands, joining us through the medium of her warm presence. “We’ll be fine.”
“I’m the lucky one,” I said thickly. “To have him. I always was. Goodbye, Ardelia, and thank you again. I’ll be in touch as soon as I get settled.”
I walked out of my father’s room without turning back.
In the hallway, I picked up my suitcases, which seemed much heavier all of a sudden, and carried them down the long corridor to the locked door that would take me out to the foyer, pausing for a moment while the nurse on the other side of the door buzzed it open, unlocking it, then buzzed it closed again, locking my father’s world behind me.