Allan was felled in mid-August by the stroke. It was now almost November. You could feel the early chill of winter in the evenings.
I was in the backyard wrapping burlap around the trunk of an oak tree that Mom and I had planted just before she broke her hip, way back before she lost her independence and her mind.
–Let’s leave something that’s more permanent than us, she said.
–Something noble?
–Precisely. Anything worthwhile takes time.
I tried to remember exactly when we’d planted it. She’d dug the hole. She had researched how to plant an oak tree. She explained a taproot, how it was different from other roots.
Our little oak was now three times as tall as I was. But now there were tiny fissures in the bark and the woman at the nursery suggested wrapping it before the frost. Water gets in behind the bark through the cracks, it seems, and freezes there. Over time it can do a lot of damage.
It was worth a try. Anything to mitigate the wear and tear of growing old.
Take a break, I told myself. Take a load off. I sat on the edge of the deck. My cellphone started jumping on the railing. I made a sudden move to grab it, but my tricky leg was uncooperative and I almost toppled.
Fuck it. If it’s important, it will ring again.
I put the phone beside me.
A dozen years ago, when I first went to work for Allan, I’d be in a panic now. When the phone rang, it was almost always about something urgent. Allan or Peggy with a critical assignment. A company to be registered or dissolved, titles searched, property transferred, an affidavit to be sworn somewhere, dictated by some stranger, often in the middle of the night. A meeting, hastily arranged with a client I knew I’d never see again or with another lawyer or with Allan’s servile board.
The meetings were usually just a few hours’ drive away, in Halifax, not so often in Toronto. Allan had kept his word, and never pressed me to relocate.
I could pretend I was a farmer while letting other people do the farming, pasturing their cattle on my land, harvesting my hay to feed their animals.
I maintained my membership in the Nova Scotia bar society, and took care of a manageable list of respectable rural and small-town clients. I developed strong professional contacts in Ontario, to whom I carefully doled out the legal work I couldn’t do myself.
Until recently, it was more or less the same for Annie. She worked from town, only visited Toronto when she wanted to. We’d meet for lunch from time to time.
The lifestyle suited me. Halfway through my fifties I’d become more conscious of my limits. I went through a phase where I’d wake up in the middle of the night, obsessed with death. Thinking, apropos of nothing: Death really happens. There will be a moment just as real as this one, but it will be my last conscious moment.
Like someone running low on money, I obsessively checked the existential bank account. Every day a debit.
Then one day on a golf course, when life seemed to have transcended time, time caught up with Allan.
The phone began to vibrate again, then the ringing started. I could see Allan’s number in the call display.
It was Peggy.
–Hey!
Her usual hello.
–Hey yourself. What’s up?
–He asked me to get you on the line. Am I interrupting something? You sound like you’re outside.
–I am outside. Just puttering. How is he?
–I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. Here he comes.
Allan’s voice was strong, but powered by a kind of urgency that said the strength was temporary.
–Is that you? he said.
–The one and only.
–I thought you’d have your bony ass up here by now. We’ve got stuff to talk about.
–Is something wrong?
–Everything is wrong. I need you here.
–I can come by the end of the week, if it’s urgent.
–You still talk to Annie?
–When I need to. You know she’s been in Toronto, mostly, since you got sick. I thought it would be temporary.
–You think me being laid up is temporary?
–Who knows?
–I damn well know. So you didn’t know she planned to stay?
–No.
–It’s something you’d better think about yourself. There’s fuck all to keep you down there now, and you’re needed here. It’s one of the things we have to talk about. You being here.
–Give me a couple of days.
–I know you and your couple of days. I’ve had Annie book you on a flight tomorrow. Check your phone. You should have an e-mail, confirming.
And Peggy on the line again.
–You can stay with us.
–Is he beside you?
–No. He’s gone back to his room.
–He sounds strong.
–It comes and goes. We can talk. Basically, things are okay. The business, I mean. The rest…
–Is Annie staying with you guys?
–She’s at the condo. You know that nice place on the harbourfront? The one we bought from the American? The guy with the girlfriend?
One of our companies had bought the apartment from a businessman who had kept a mistress there. When the woman moved on to an even wealthier Australian, the American put it on the market at a price that I’d considered to be outrageous. Allan bought it without haggling, and paid for it in cash.
–I know the one, I said.
–Well, I think she’s going to take it over.
–So she’s decided to live up there.
–For now, at least. But there isn’t much there, at the condo, hardly any furniture. So stay with us. Okay?
When I called her, Annie said she’d pick me up at the airport.
–We’ll have time for a drink while I’m there, I hope. I’m not staying long.
–Maybe you should get someone to shut the water off. Suspend the services while you’ll be gone.
–You think that I’ll be up there for a while? Think again.
–You’ll see for yourself when you get here.
–So why didn’t you let me know that you were staying on?
–Because, Byron, I didn’t know myself. I wasn’t ready for what I found here. You should be prepared.
After she’d hung up, there was the sound of a distant truck. And then nothing.
I returned to the oak tree. I was moving slowly but felt breathless just the same. When I crouched to tie the burlap, pain shot through the knee of my good leg. All part of a new reality.
Lately, I’d begun to feel a little flash of panic if I moved too quickly. It wasn’t about the limp, which has always been so much a part of who I am.
I’d tell myself: You’re only in your fifties. What will your sixties feel like? Don’t even think about the seventies.
And now I heard myself admitting to the oak tree how much I missed another human presence.
Is it involuntary solitude that makes us prematurely old?
I went inside and poured a drink, carried it out to the deck and sat studying my burlap-swaddled oak. Almost all the trees and shrubbery around me had been planted and nurtured by my mother. An optimistic statement, I suppose, acknowledging our limitations but conscious of the continuity of life.
The sun was setting, promising tomorrow. A promise and a threat, the way I saw it. I felt the chill of the gathering darkness.
I stood. My body ached. Old sensations working now in tandem with the new aches and pains, from which there will be no recovery.
I can live with dying. Everybody must. But what about that other possibility? The one that robs us of our ability to know anything? Mom stayed silent on that score.
At first she did try to welcome her dementia as a gift of spontaneity, the freedom to be herself, say anything she wanted without consequences, say anything to anyone, about anyone. I believe the reality I witnessed was something else, an imprisonment.
I went inside, turned on a light and turned up the heat. I considered pouring another drink. Maybe not a great idea, I told myself.
I sat in front of my computer, the reliable escape hatch, entryway to everywhere. The compensation for everything that everybody isn’t, for everything that isn’t spoken when and where it should be, isn’t heard or understood when and where we need the knowledge.
I typed in “dementia” and waited for the predictable avalanche of information.
And in the middle of it all, I read that there are facilities where, for a surprisingly modest sum of money, experts will track the secrets lurking in our genetic code, where time stores all her strategies, where destiny lies dormant, waiting to surprise us.
I made notes. I made up my mind.