After

T
hough the June night was hot, my hands were icy as I fumbled for my keys at the front door. Mr. Enrique, my Spanish teacher, leaned out of his car window. “Good luck, son,” he yelled as he drove off down the dark street.

My mother opened the creaky wooden door just as I turned the key.

“Maman, what’s wrong?” I asked.

She looked ashen, numb. “It’s over.
Point final.
” When my mother says
point final
, everybody snaps to attention, even the dog, so I didn’t resist when she took my arm and led me to her bedroom. It was the only place in the house where there was an air conditioner, though it hadn’t been turned on since my father had lost his job. The stairs felt like they would never end. No stairway to heaven, that’s for sure. My mother closed the bedroom
door very carefully behind her as if the sky–or the air conditioner–might fall on me.

“I have bad news, sweetheart.” Her blue eyes were blurry with tears.

Sweetheart. The last time I could remember her calling me that was when we were both crammed into a toilet cubicle in the ladies’ room at Eaton’s because I was too young to go by myself and she was coaxing me to hurry.

I sat down on the big rumpled bed, feeling like Louis XVI waiting to go to the guillotine, or Louis Riel waiting to be hanged.

1992. I hate that year. Queen Elizabeth described it as an
annus horribilus
because Windsor Castle burned down and Charles and Diana separated. That was the year that George Bush got sick on a visit to Japan and vomited on the Japanese Prime Minister. Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina declared their own republic. What else? In June my father hanged himself in the attic.

After that, the world did not stop, although that seemed odd to me at the time. Here’s the short version of what happened after.

Summer: I spent the summer more or less in my room with the curtains drawn. When it got too hot, I took my
guitar out on the stairway that runs down the back of our house, where nobody could see me. My Aunt Sophie took charge of my little brother, Luc. I think they went to the park or the swimming pool or to the doughnut shop a lot. I can’t say for sure, because I didn’t notice. My mother left the house every morning and went to work at the post office. When she got home she scrubbed every possible surface in the house, and when she was finished she started scrubbing all over again. After days of whining to be let out and then whining some more to be let back in, our dog, Sputnik, spent a lot of time under the porch asleep.

Autumn: I went back to school. Luc went to kindergarten in the mornings and to day care at the church down the street in the afternoons. When he was home, he stuck to my side like a burr. Maman worked, scrubbed, and yelled at me, Luc, and the dog.

Winter: You should know that Montréal in winter is cold and dark and snowy. We were three strangers living side by side in an old house on a steep street. Christmas came and went. Maman’s scrubbing lost momentum, and she spent a lot of time staring at the fire in the fireplace. By January the street had grown so narrow from snowdrifts and buried parked cars that I felt like an Arctic explorer when I made the trek home from school. Luc wanted me to carry him whenever we were outside. He was so heavy in his snowsuit and boots that I thought my back would break.

Spring: I had my sixteenth birthday Maman got a better job. Luc talked to Sputnik as they played catch in the backyard. The darkness receded.

I think that about wraps up the nuts and bolts, but as I said, I can’t be 100 percent sure. My heart lived a different, terrible life of its own that year. Time stretched and shrank and grief took up residence inside me. It was a living, breathing creature that I could not control. This isn’t the story of what I did that year. It’s the story of what I felt.

I was on a school trip to New York with fifteen other kids and three teachers. I was wild to go, but because money was so tight at home, I made a deal with the principal that I’d help the caretaker for a half hour every day. For months I’d mopped the halls and emptied trash cans and pried gum off desks, but I got to New York.

We had a lot lined up: visits to Rockefeller Center and Times Square and the Metropolitan Museum to see the gigantic Temple of Dendur set up in one of the rooms. That was strange: this ancient building that human hands like mine had made over two thousand years ago and thousands of miles away, standing quietly in a museum while vendors hawked pretzels and hot dogs outside. I
bought a souvenir for my father, a Rangers jersey. The Rangers were his favorite hockey team, after the Montréal Canadiens. He hated the Toronto Maple Leafs.

New York was great, but I was homesick. I love Montreal as if it all belongs to me, personally: it’s my Olympic Stadium, my smoked meat sandwiches, my old brick house halfway up its narrow, tree-lined street, my friends, my music. I missed Luc, even though he woke me up at dawn every day to play with his Lego and Hot Wheels, not something I’d recommend as a quiet way to ease into the day.

The telephone rang in the hotel room. We were on the tenth floor but we could hear the buzz of morning traffic through the open window.

“Hey, Francis, it’s your mother,” Houston was sprawled on the slippery nylon bedspread flipping through a guide to the city. I had been flossing my teeth, something not to be skipped, especially when you’ve just eaten three hot dogs with sauerkraut, and you haven’t brushed your teeth for three days in a row. Gross. I thought Maman might be calling because she was missing me, or she was worried that I was too hot or too cold or something. My mother is a champion worrier.

“Francis, you have to come back to Montreal as soon as you can,” she said. “Mr. Enrique will drive you.”

“Did Grandpa have a heart attack?” A month doesn’t go by without a Grandpa Heart Attack Scare. I’m trying to make it sound funny, but it’s not.