Requiem (2 page)

As soon as Kay and I hang up, I phone Greg to tell him about the trip—before I change my mind. It’s an hour later on the East Coast but he’s up, studying. He, too, is surprised at my sudden announcement.

“Hey,” he says, “you’re really going back? Through the mountains? All the way?”

“Through the Rockies,” I tell him. “As far inland as the camp, but not all the way to the Pacific. Do you want to come? It’s been a while since we crossed the country by car.”

“I’d love to, Dad, but I have term papers to finish. After exams, I have to prepare my research project.”

Greg has a spot in a summer fellowship program in Massachusetts—exactly where he wants to be. He deserves to be excited about this.

“I don’t have all the dates figured out yet,” he says. “But maybe we can get together in Cape Cod while I’m there. Or even earlier. I’ll let you know as soon as everything is confirmed.”

During the conversation, while he tells me what he’ll be doing at Woods Hole, the Oceanographic Institution, I find myself calling up a memory of a time when he discovered a dolphin skull on the shores of Passamaquoddy Bay. Almost eleven years ago. The Fundy tide was low; we’d been beachcombing. The skull had washed up on brown and slippery rocks, the elongated bones of its distinctive rostrum bleached by the sun. Greg easily recognized it for what it was, a perfect discovery for a ten-year-old. The skull stank for months, but we dried it in the sun in the backyard an entire summer, until it was odourless enough to be in his room. It’s still there, on a shelf with his other marine treasures.

We say goodbye, I hang up the phone and lean forward to see what Basil has dropped at my feet. It’s a message, a dismembered sleeve, a rag, a duster tugged up and out of the hamper. Part of a sweatshirt Lena used to wear around the house.

I recognize this as a measure of Basil’s distress. He’s a pack animal. And a member of his pack—our pack—is missing.

F
ive-thirty in the morning and I’ve been dreaming of Lena. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, wrapped in a cream-coloured robe that I don’t recall, her bare legs crossed at the knee. It was the way she always sat: on kitchen chairs, on the chesterfield, in the seats of airplanes. But there she was, in the dream, her dark hair pushed back behind her ears. My first thought was:
Lena is okay. She can move, she can speak
. She was teasing, telling me I’d slept the sleep of the high-strung and uneasy. Before that, she curled into my body deliberately, her skin as soft as it was when she was in her twenties, when I first met her.

Then I woke, or thought I woke, to see her sitting beside me. She raised an eyebrow, as if waiting for me to say something. But when I reached for her, she was gone. Did I call out? Perhaps that was part of the dream—believing I had.

I glance at the clock, 5:18, shove back the covers and force myself, will myself, to get up, even though it’s still dark. I go to the window, naked, and pull back one of the curtains. Search for the line of river on the northern edge of the city and feel the disappointment as I realize, in the fog between sleep and awareness, that this is not the river of my childhood after all. So real is my childhood river, I can call up at any moment its steep banks, the steady rush of fast and muddy water, the ribbon of blue-green coming in from the side.

I push down the fluttering, the extra beats inside my chest, try to smother the sense of panic. And as I stare out, I recall an earlier dream. Or perhaps fragments of the same dream, a prequel of sorts.

I had been moving from one place to another, as one’s dream-self does, changing scenes in a way that makes no sense to the conscious mind. I was walking in drizzling rain, searching for the Fraser River below the camp. As I descended the steep path, I caught glimpses of a horizontal rope of cloud stretched low above the turbulent water. I was wet and miserable and fatigued, and lay on the ground in that damp, leaden air, hoping to rest. When I woke, it was to find myself at the river’s edge. Again, Lena was there, her body curled into mine.

Let it go
, I tell myself.
Let her go
. I release the curtain and make my way downstairs in bare feet. Open the door for Basil, who streaks past in a grizzled mass of coiled energy and, just as coiled, returns. For a dog who is ten years old, he has surprising vigour. I pour pellets into his dish and turn away while he gallops through his food. The pellets resemble swollen cigarette butts stripped of their papers, an image I can do without so early in the morning.

A thin light has begun to filter down over the street. Next door, in the backyard of my elderly neighbour, Miss Carrie, a chaotic tangle of gooseberry bushes has emerged from under cover of melting snow. The snowbanks have shrunk to grass level now, but it’s a stretch to believe that bulbs are pushing up under that layer of slush. Years ago, Lena planted crocuses in our own backyard and, every spring, delicate purples and yellows defy the weight of winter and reappear like tendrils of hope.

Basil nudges my leg, my cue to pour water into his bowl. I wonder when to tell him we’re going on a trip. If I say the word, or even spell it aloud, as Lena and Greg and I used to do—though he quickly caught on—he’ll begin to run in tight, frantic circles until it’s time for me to say:
Get in the car, Basil
. From the way I’m being watched, I suspect he already knows. He’s tensed and ready, waiting for the words.

Despite his canine intuition, I make an effort to behave as if this is a morning like any other. I leave him in the kitchen and go back upstairs to dress, shave, pack a duffle bag. Shirts, socks, underwear, rough clothes for hiking that I can throw into a machine at a laundromat along the way—but only when necessary.

I add a couple of extra razors to my shaving kit and go to my studio, same side of the house as the bedroom. The blinds are never closed here. Clouds are tilted on their edges out there, a fleet of sails tucked to one another, news gusting from afar. With daylight lowering into the cold glint of city, I can see the Ottawa River more clearly now, a winding strip of darkness that defines the borders of two provinces. The Peace Tower erupts to the left. Old and dun, it lauds the sky without assumption, while the seats of power, the offices of Parliament, reside on either side. Not a scene I relish when I think of how the power was used in 1942. I focus, instead, on the smudges of pewter that are trees and bushes along the edge of the river as it disappears into an outline of hills behind.

I look down at my work table, knowing I’ve left the most important part of packing to the end. Every journey begins the same way. With reluctance, holding part of the self in abeyance, a distancing until I’m ready. I’m caught by this feeling, no matter what the destination. It’s a suspension of the
want
, the real work, the getting serious, the facing up. But facing up also means admitting the dark places that are only too ready to seep from the shadows. It occurs to me that I’m not unlike Basil, turning circles inside the front door as soon as he imagines a hand reaching for a jacket.

I stand, hands extended over the surface, ready to choose. Floor lamp to one side, small easel before me, supplies laid out as if I’d been painting only yesterday. Two plastic containers, water in one. Striped socks, a contrast of cobalt and dusky blue, slit lengthwise and made into rags that hang from hooks at the side of the table. A bar of Sunlight soap, worn flat in an old sardine tin. Brushes of every size laid out side by side; a dozen stubby bottles of acrylics in colours I’ve blended myself.

The truth is, I haven’t been in this room for weeks. The truth is, I haven’t cared about this room or the paintings in it. My heart lurches as if my thoughts have just created a zone called
danger
.

Across the room, an abandoned abstract leans into the larger of my two easels. From here, the edges are dark and menacing. Tentacles grope along the lower half, trying to slither into position. At the top left, oranges and yellows spill from what could be a split gourd, a generous, big-hearted offering. I feel a jolt of something stirring, some earlier sense-image. I’m struck by the balance of the whole. But just as quickly, the glimmer of satisfaction is gone. A broad, pumpkin-coloured sweep wants a push to the centre; it wants … or maybe it’s all right as it is and should be left alone.

When did I have the desire of those oranges and yellows inside me? I try to recover the feeling I had when I began to work on the canvas. Because here’s the proof that I was making an effort, even if it turned out to be an aborted thrust. Stab and pull back, stab and pull back.

Anger is not so easy to disguise to the self.

My sister, Kay, would have something to say about that—if given the opening. She fills the silent spaces, has a name, a theory, for everything. As a child, she was always a leader. But she’s more authoritative now, her ambition to the fore. It’s partly her job, what she deals with every day in her work as a counsellor. She has to define problems, probe for solutions, solve problems. Sometimes I picture a sleep-deprived student facing her across a wide desk, fumbling, looking down at his lap, inventing answers he thinks she would like to hear.

And what about Greg? Has he been seeing a counsellor at his own university? He wouldn’t tell me one way or another. Not that I would ask. I don’t push my way into his territory unless invited.

At the beginning, after Lena’s death, after the funeral in November, he phoned home every few days. His grief was raw and undisguised, the calls painfully brief. They are less frequent now—more like every few weeks.

“Dad? Are you working yet? Are you okay?”

I wasn’t able to help him and didn’t know how anyway. Greg has been a worrier, a
Gramps
, from the day he was born. Remembering the waver in his voice during one of those calls makes me think of another episode from his childhood. He hadn’t yet started school and I was away on assignment, doing illustrations for a natural history magazine that paid extremely well. I was staying at a motel in Alberta’s Badlands and had been gone almost two weeks when I received a letter from Lena. In those days, we wrote when either of us was away. Or sent cards.

You’ve been missed from the moment you boarded the plane. All the way back from the airport Greg stared glumly out the side window of the car. He said, “It isn’t funny, you know. It isn’t one bit funny when the family is split up like this.” When we returned to the house, he spread his palms—truly indignant—and said, accusing ME, as if I were the one responsible, “Now there are only two.”

And how
, Lena continued,
am I supposed to handle that?

A picture from Greg was enclosed, three large crayoned stick figures holding hands. It was labelled FAMBLY. A multicoloured rainbow arced across the upper right corner. At the bottom left were a stick-figure dinosaur and a hoodoo, both tiny, as if to let me know that the work I was doing was small, in comparison to FAMBLY.

Well, we are two again, but a different two, and Greg and I are stumbling along, but in separate parts of the country.

I look around my workroom and wish for what I cannot have. A time warp, a few moments when the three of us are living under one roof again. A light left on in the hall for the last person to come in from the dark. A meal of heated leftovers, nothing fancy. A note from Lena on the fridge door telling me she has taken Greg to his swimming lesson. The music of Benny Goodman floating out from the living room, announcing that Lena is home from work. Our bodies touching, by intent, as we brush past each other in the doorway.

A sharp bark from Basil at the foot of the stairs gets me moving again, and I begin to slide items into a shoulder pack from shelves above the table. A bound sketch pad, India ink, bamboo stylus that I probably won’t use but will bring anyway. A wooden box with a hinged lid that Greg unearthed at a flea market in Halifax two years ago and gave me for Christmas. A faded list, pasted inside the lid, shows that the box was once used to store medical slides. In thin lines of penmanship, the list reads:
Blood, Cardiac muscle
,
Trachea, Tonsil, Tooth
. I’ve left the list in place because I like the idea of objects in their original state. And I use the box now to hold charcoal, graphite pencils, jackknife for sharpening, soft eraser, quills. I take these on the road with me every time I travel. When Greg came home during Christmas break that year, he packed the box inside a carry-on suitcase he’d built from cardboard. There had been snowstorms on the East Coast and these had caused airport confusions, cancellations, rebookings, a bleary-eyed son arriving hours late. A son who was proud of his homemade suitcase and had Lena and me laughing the moment we picked him up and took a look at his luggage.

I stuff more bits and pieces into the side pockets of my pack. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll need, but I’ll figure this out along the way. More slit socks for rags, a capped container for water. Some of my river drawings are abstracts in graphite; some have been done in pen and ink. The larger acrylics were done at home in my studio. My upcoming show will be a mixture of the three.

I add a second sketch pad, though it’s a joke to think I’ll fill two. This isn’t a trip to the other side of the planet. The overseas work was done—sporadically—during the decade before the idea became a proposal.
River themes
was the way Lena referred to my project, long before the work revealed its true shape to me.

I cast my memory back over countries visited, histories read, tales of rivers listened to and told. Not to mention the stack of drawings and paintings that has accumulated. My friend Nathan, who owns the gallery where I exhibit, suggested the show while I was still seeing the work in its separate parts.

“Join them up,” he said. “Why not?” And then he began to talk quickly, as if he had a plan, as if the words might stop if he slowed down. “Put the ink drawings and some of the acrylics together,” he said. “Just the river series. You select, you decide. The theme is fabulous, Bin, it’s a great sequence. Every painting, every drawing is different, but with a mood or form that sets it apart. Totally recognizable as an Okuma abstract. I especially love the sensation of movement. The work is poetic, lyrical. And we can link the exhibit with publication. Otto will do the catalogue, I’m sure of it—he has the money. You can add short personal accounts if you want text. Leave that part to me; I’ll discuss it with Otto. He’ll probably want to write the introduction himself, he knows your work so well. We’ll have the show and launch the book at the same time. We can celebrate, have a grand opening.”