One spring morning, I awake early, a loud gang of birds, as usual, chortling outside my window in a nearby evergreen. I happen to glance at the calendar, June 19. Three years exactly since Archibald’s death. I get up with the intent of making a pot of coffee, an essential for a teacher who is not a morning person, but instead find myself passing through the kitchen into the living room. I open the balcony doors and step outside.
The morning is cool, and the air is filled with the smell of flower nectar and downy earth. The neighbourhood is quiet, rows of neat houses and well-manicured lawns on a sloping hill. I stand for a second and then I know. It is time. Now or never. I take a deep breath, open my mouth and scream in my loudest voice, “WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!”
It comes out like a crazed war cry, an ear-shattering yowl that reaches above the rooftops and echoes through the streets, penetrating walls and invading the sweet dreams of more than a few people for whom it must have come as an unwelcome wake-up call. But for me, it is exhilarating. When I finally finish, I stand gasping, feeling as though I have used up every ounce of breath. I lean over for a minute, recovering. When I stand up again, my next door neighbour, a retired engineer, is standing on his balcony, peering at me with a disgruntled expression, his robe billowing, his little pug dog tucked under his arm. A newspaper boy on the sidewalk, his stack of newspapers at his feet, stares up at me with a mixture of shock and approval on his face. They seem to be my only witnesses. Archibald is nowhere in sight. I give them a quick wave, shrug as though this is a standard part of my morning ritual, and step inside.
I see my mother more frequently now and am pleased that she has relaxed into a new relationship. Archibald’s death, I think, has been, for her, a release from past mistakes. I have a job teaching and enjoy shocking my students with an occasional anecdote in Archibald-like fashion. Although I date occasionally, I haven’t been seriously drawn to anyone. I still compare all men to Sam, and they all fall flat. But I’ve grown to enjoy daily life again and all of the new patterns that go along with it. It isn’t perfect, far from it. But I like where I am, even if I have no idea where I am going. But do any of us?
One day, I find myself visiting the university bookstore. I haven’t been back since Sam’s death. It hasn’t changed all that much. I search through the familiar alcoves, fingers tracing shelves that are like old friends, until I come to what I am looking for. Archibald’s section. It is smaller than it had been before. Five books in stock, including his latest, the one about my exploits. I pull it out and flip through it, remembering the horror I had felt at being exposed. But it was, after all, only a story. Would he have understood the fact that I never finished it? That I needed to leave the story of myself, in any version, in progress? I smile. He would have understood my last act of rebellion.
“Maggie? Is that you?”
I turn, taken by surprise. In front of me is a familiar handsome man, tall, with a square jaw, and light hair. The extra wide shoulders were still the same. The glasses were new.
“Dan?” It came out as a question. I had heard his company had expanded and grown very successful, that he still lived out east. I hadn’t spoken to him since I had thrown him out of my house and life, although I had thought of him often. “Is it really you?”
“Maggie!” he says joyfully and before I know it, he squeezes me in a giant bear hug, which is so familiar that I have to smile. In fact, I find I can’t stop.
“It’s been so long. What? Almost three years.”
“Three and a half,” he says.
And he takes me for dinner, and afterwards we smoke a joint for old time’s sake on the roof of my house, overlooking the dark, restless ocean. He sits beside me and we enjoy an easy, companionable silence. And a feeling creeps up on me. His forearm presses against mine. My skin tingles pleasantly from the contact.
“Has there been anyone for you, since Sam?” he asks.
“No, not really,” I say. “How about you? Is there someone special?” I expected that there was a girlfriend or wife in Toronto. I noticed that he wasn’t wearing a ring, but that wasn’t necessarily conclusive.
“Nobody serious.”
“Sam was … he was … for me, just so…” I grasp. Consuming. Engulfing. Eclipsing. He had used the word once to describe my effect on him. But the truth was he had rubbed everything and everyone out. It had taken me so long to see the world without reference to him. Even after he had broken up with me, I had held on to him, in denial that I might see him again. I had said goodbye once, but had I finally let him go?
“I know,” he says and his face tells me he does. We understood each other. He had loved him, too. And Sam no longer felt like a liability between us; sharing Sam felt good. It felt like a bond.
“Do you remember the picture I painted of you on Halloween? In drag?”
He laughs. “How could I forget?”
“I still have that painting. I could never sell it,” I say. “Sometimes when I would get really down, I would take it out and look at it.”
“I looked pretty hilarious, if I remember correctly.”
“No, you looked like you — in a dress of course. It was a tribute to all of the qualities I admire.”
I look at him. And he looks over at me bashfully.
“I am sorry. I never said thank you,” I say.
“Thank you?” The light is fading quickly. “For?”
“For being there. All those times. You were always…” I search for the words I know I owe him. “In my memory you are heroic. Just like in the painting. Honest, strong, loyal.”
“Maggie. That means a lot. But I always admired you.”
“Me?” I am surprised. “What for?”
He averts his face. “For putting yourself out there. Painting things your way. For trying, but most of all for getting through it. All of that stuff. Your grandfather, his book, Sam loving you, leaving you, and then all of us.” He motions to a clump of wild daisies on the hillside. “The most beautiful flowers are the ones that grow, in droughts, in snow, that persevere. You sent me away. Most people would have used me up and thrown me out.”
“If memory serves correct, I did throw you out.”
“No. You told me the truth when it hurt the most. You were always a good friend. You never abused that.”
His words remind me of what I said to Sam, on that last Saskatchewan day, so long ago. I blink back tears.
“As for me. Heroic? I don’t think so.”
“Well, now I just have to add modest to the list.”
“No.” The firmness of his voice takes me aback. “I was never brave enough to be honest with you. I should have told you, told you years ago.”
“Dan? Told me what?” I wait for a bomb to drop, to be disappointed again. I wait for the skeletons to spill out of the closet and hit the floor.
“The reason I cared. The reason I spent so much time with you wasn’t because I was noble or being neighbourly; it was because I was in love with you. I tried to tell you so many times. But I never could.”
“Until now,” I say, feeling a whole bunch of pieces slide into place.
“Until now. Can you forgive me?”
“Forgive you? Forgive you? For being in love with me?” I can’t fight the warmth tugging at my insides, the thawing of feelings that had long been put on ice. My heart thunks so quickly, it speaks my next words for me. “For still being in love with me?”
“Still.” His hands are on mine, holding them. Had he been holding them all along?
“I will forgive you for being a coward if you will forgive me for being a complete idiot.”
“Idiot?” Now he laughs. A big booming sound that I haven’t heard since the old days.
“For not knowing. For not guessing,” And I had never guessed. I had scratched the surface here and there, seen glimpses, but I had not connected the dots, not really. “For being too caught up in my own head and for almost missing you.”
“I forgive you.”
I inch towards him, but a sudden dread of the unknown, unseen currents encircled me, charged through the air: fears, broken promises, shadows. There were so many uncertainties in life, so much willful ignorance and accidental wisdom gleaned in brief glimpses and forgotten seconds later, washed away in the opiate of our choice and the obliteration of sleep.
Each day was filled with loose ends and gnarled knots, complete with a beginning, middle and an end. The laws of attraction say love will touch each of us, caress us and burn us, heal old wounds, open new ones. Why sign up for this punishing cycle at all? We are all cowards and idiots at varying intervals. We can hide out in front of the TV, eat ourselves to death, kill ourselves at the office, screw our faces off, or take vows of absolution. But some collisions can’t be avoided; some occur so quickly we don’t know what hit us and others take place so slowly that we don’t feel the impact. Like electrons, we intersect and break apart, until something else holds us together, whether it be nuclear fusion, love alchemy, or basic endorphins. Science and metaphysics circle around themselves at a vertigo inducing rate, trying to dissect and explain. But surrendering to love takes a human emotion: trust. And this willingness to trust creates something even better: hope. Could I hazard hope? Could I trust one more time?
I slide my arms around his neck and kiss him. I close my eyes and open them, and Dan is still there. And only stars are left encircling us in the velvet blanket of darkness. And I know how the first stargazers felt, at once luminous and obscured by a cosmos of infinite possibilities.
“Did I tell you I met Archibald again?” he asks.
“Really?” I lift my head from his shoulder. “When?”
“It was just before I left for Toronto. I went back to the apartment building. I don’t know why, maybe to say goodbye. Anyway, he was sitting in the lobby, looking tired. I tried to walk past him, but he recognized me and called me over.”
“So, what happened?” I ask.
“He said, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ I said, ‘I’m Dan, a friend of Maggie’s…’ He looked at me for a long time, almost as though he were reading my thoughts. And, finally, he said, ‘Well, in that case, big boy, why don’t you come up and see me some time?’”
I laugh. “Mae West was a favourite of his. He thought he had been her in a past life.”
“And then I went to Sam’s apartment. I couldn’t stop myself, I found myself outside his door. I had to see it again.”
I hadn’t been back since Sam had moved out. “What happened? Was someone else living there?”
“I knocked, and when no one answered, I turned the handle. I let myself in and it was empty, no trace of him. It was like he had never been there at all, except for the faded paint where the pictures had been. It was so small.”
“Yes.” I remember the first day he carried me in there, when I had just started working for Archibald and my back had given out. It was the size of a closet, but it was also an oasis, with its books and restful silence on that hot day. I wanted to be confined in that closet. It changed me, claimed me, and I have never forgotten it. In some ways I am still there.
Perhaps I always would be.