They Left Us Everything (16 page)

I discover that I can’t easily make this decision about Sambo. Two weeks of debate takes place between my brothers and me. When we finally reach a verdict, we decide we’ll do it together. I wish I could let Pelmo know, but she’s in Tibet, out of contact. I tell my children, “Sambo will die next Friday … we’ve booked the appointment.”

Chris and Victor drive out to Oakville and meet me at the house. At the vet’s I’m distraught, so after kissing Sambo and thanking him for all he’s brought to our family, I place him in
Chris’s arms and go to sit in the waiting room. I look at all the other families there with their pets. There’s an elderly woman in a pale blue parka holding a black Persian cat, a middle-aged couple with a collie, and a mother and her young son cradling a beige plastic cage. The cage is empty.

When Chris and Victor finally emerge empty-handed from the back corridor, Chris is holding Sambo’s small red leather collar with its tinkling tags—a sound I know so well. He tells me he cradled and patted Sambo as the needle went in and that Sambo simply shut his eyes and went to sleep; he didn’t even twitch. I can’t stop crying. Chris and Victor both put their arms around me and we walk to the car together. We’re told to return in a few weeks for the ashes, and we decide we’ll sprinkle them with Mum’s. Later, when I find tufts of Sambo’s hair in his steel-wired brush, I take it out to the frosted garden and put it in the wiry branches of the leafless forsythia bush for the birds. I hope they can use it in the spring to warm their nests. Maybe the squirrels will use it before then.

When I get home from the vet, I desperately want a bath. But Mum and Dad’s bathtub doesn’t hold water, the drain mechanism failing like so much else. Even though the lever still works, there’s an imperceptible and steady leak. I take the flat rubber stopper from the kitchen sink and for the first time in memory have a bath lasting longer than five minutes.

I stand in my towel in Mum’s bedroom and look out her window at the lake. It appears calm on the surface, but underneath I know it’s doing some very strange things. There’s a phenomenon on the lake called a
seiche
—a standing wave that sloshes back and forth in a vertical motion, getting slowly and suspensefully bigger, kind of like a mini tsunami. It doesn’t usually cause any damage, unless it gets really big—like the
ten-foot one that hit Chicago in 1954 and swept eight fishermen to their deaths. But it’s made me remember the recurring nightmare I used to have as a child.

In my dream, I’m standing with Mum and Dad and all the people of the town, silently facing the lake. Our line snakes along the shore, as far as the eye can see, in both directions. We’re all holding hands, staring up in horror at a wall of water—a monster wave—that hovers over us at the shore. The whitecap on its lip foams and curls hundreds of feet in the air, threatening to crash down at any moment and drown us … but it never does. And nobody says a thing. I used to wake in a cold sweat and run to the window to check that the lake was still flat.

Mum and Dad’s wedding in England, 1944

En route to the Far East by ship after the war to meet Dad for the first time, and with my amah, Ali Kan

Reunited with Dad in Hong Kong, 1947

In 1952, Mum and Dad found a barn of a place overlooking the lake

Dad began shoring up the exterior

Mum named it “Point O’ View”

On Saturday evenings, Dad rolled up the carpets and sprinkled wax so dinner guests could dance more gracefully across the hardwood floors

Mum got all dressed up and Dad often wore his tux—even for my thirteenth birthday party in the dining room (below)