They Left Us Everything (26 page)

Basically the pool was a concrete pit, just like the one Mum had known as a child at Rokeby. It had no heating apparatus and was best used in the winter—as a skating rink. But Dad grew to love it. He was hardy. More or less as soon as the ice melted, Dad would dive in. Naked. He had it all to himself.

An inspector comes for the day to comb through the house with his flashlight and tools. We want to know if there are any structural problems so that we can be upfront with potential buyers. He crawls into the knee walls, goes up the trap door into the attic, and takes his flashlight under the house. He’s surprised by how sturdy the house is. “Rock solid,” he calls it. There’s a little dampness under one of the windows in Mum’s bedroom, but this is no surprise. The plaster is falling away in clumps and has been for years. Mum’s favourite bird, a brown speckled swallow, always builds his nest outside that window, plugging the eavestrough. The only way to stop the moisture was to evict the bird, which Mum refused to do.

We decide to contact the three individuals who have expressed interest in the house and hold a private auction. Victor designs an official bidding form, sends it out in early
August, and we sit back and wait. But as the days tick towards the deadline, we receive disappointing news: one by one the bids evaporate.

On the last day, I get an urgent call from a man who wasn’t on our list. He says our house has always been his favourite, but he’s only just heard it’s for sale. Can he come see it? When he arrives, I give him “The Cook’s Tour.”

In the nineteenth century, Thomas Cook & Sons was a British travel company famous for organizing guided sightseeing tours that crammed as much as possible into the shortest period of time. It spawned expressions like “Around the World in Eighty Days” and “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium.” I lead this man in and out of the house in less than half an hour, but I can tell he’s smitten. He asks for the bidding form; one day later we receive his offer. It’s close to our asking price and Victor’s pleased—now we can celebrate his wedding to Peni in September without any house-sale negotiations hanging over our heads. The papers aren’t signed, since the buyer still has to confer with his bank, but we agree on a handshake. The details will be ironed out when Victor returns from his honeymoon.

The night after we accept his offer, though, a strange thing happens. I’m alone downstairs, cleaning up my dinner dishes, when I hear a loud bang upstairs. I run to investigate and find that Mum’s bedroom door has slammed shut. When I try to pull it open it’s locked … from the inside. Dread slithers through me—because her lock is a small hook and eye. It’s entirely possible that a gust of strong wind sucked her door closed, but what are the chances that the tiny hook at the top of her door could fly up and land precisely in the tiny metal
eyelet on the door frame? My heart starts pounding wildly. I race downstairs, out the back door in the dark, and over to Pucci’s house. Even though it’s late, I can see across the garden that their lights are still on. Phil helps me search room to room, but there’s no evidence of intruders or ghosts.

What am I to make of this? Does this mean Mum is giving her blessing to the sale, telling me I can leave her bedroom now and move on? Or is she telling us this is the wrong buyer and she wants him out of her bedroom?

In a frenzy of confusion, I ask if I can paint the buyer’s portrait. I’m having difficulty visualizing him in this house, so I think that if I can paint him in context, it might help me. He agrees to sit for me on the verandah when I offer to give him the finished portrait as a housewarming present.

Victor thinks I’m crazy.

“Why would you paint a portrait for free?” he says. “And why this guy? You don’t even know him!”

But I can’t explain it. I just need to work things out through my art.

The next day I open the broom closet looking for paint rags and find a plastic bag holding what looks like a matted grey wig.
Eew
… what is it? It looks strangely familiar and yet at the same time repugnant. I take it out in the sunlight and feel it with my hands: animal, mineral, or vegetable? Its strange coarseness resonates deep within me—a living, breathing memory—and suddenly I drop the bag. It’s animal! I find myself battling nausea. I run to the phone to call Pelmo.

“There’s a bag on a hook in the broom closet that has something … that’s, uh … grey and …”

“Sambo, is it?”

I’m bent over double, afraid I will faint.

She giggles. “Your mum, about the knitting she is reading in her news. From the dogs they take the wool. She save when I give brushing to Sambo. Your Mum, she thinks this can be good.”

When I get over my shock, I shake the whole bag into the forsythia bush so that Mum’s favourite bird can pad his nest. Maybe he’ll take the hint and leave the eavestrough.

It’s August 12th again—Mum’s birthday—and I decide to make her a homemade birthday card and place it with flowers on her memorial plaque. I take my mug of morning coffee and go out through the garden gate, lifting the fox ears on the latch and hearing their
chink
behind me. I associate the garden gate with so many memories. When the ears on the cast-iron fox flop down, their muted
chinking
sound reminds me of playing hide-and-seek with Dad. I can hear laughter, feel my heartbeat as I run, see fireflies in the dusky sky. I also associate it with afternoon tea—a neighbour’s head appearing through the bushes, a wicker chair scraping across the verandah, Mum standing up: “Hello there!” Opening the gate.
Chink-chink.

There’s a bench by the fence but I don’t sit down; I just stand by the tree and let its energy surge through me. We have such deep roots here.

I read Mum’s plaque:
ANNE ARMISTEAD WILLIAMS …
BORN AUGUSY 16TH, 1916
. Wait a minute …
the 16th?

Shit! That’s not her birthday—that’s the date of her wedding!

I race back up to the house, spilling my coffee. I call Victor.

“There’s a typo on Mum’s memorial plaque! Her birthdate is wrong!”

“Don’t get your knickers in a knot,” he says. “It’s no big deal.”

“How could we have done this to her?” “Didn’t you proofread it?” he asks. “You were in charge of the wording.”

“No, I wasn’t!”

“Yes, you were!”

“We have to change it!”

“It’s cast in bronze! You can’t just take an eraser and rub out bronze.”

“We have to order a new one, then.”

“Are you crazy? It’s concreted in!”

“I don’t care,” I say, “this is important to me.”

I have memories of Dad, tromping through all the family graveyards in England and Portugal, making copious notes of names and dates on ancestral headstones so that he could leave us with a genealogical trail back to the early 1700s. Mum’s family did the same thing: her brother built a separate cottage on his property to house the family papers.

“How many people are going to know—or care—when Mum’s birthday is?” asks Victor. “At least we got the month right!”

When I tell Robin, he seems not surprised. “I hate to tell you, but last time I was home I noticed there’s an error on Dad’s as well.”

“There is?”

“Yep … the dates of Dad’s years with his company are wrong. Instead of 1931–1977 it should say 1933–1978.”

“What should we do?”

“We could order a fourth plaque,” he says, chuckling, “and title it ‘Errata.’ We could issue it from the Oakville
Hysterical
Society’s Department of Corrections!”

I will never trust information on gravestones again.

The tree that shades Mum’s plaque is a sapling that we planted after Sandy died. My parents outlived the 120-year-old maple that used to stand in the same spot. It was a grand beauty with a ninety-inch girth and sweeping arms that branched out over the lake. It seemed almost human to me. I used to wonder what it had seen—who had paddled by in a canoe or stroked its bark in the 1800s? As children, we used to pitch our tent under its leafy canopy in summer and swing on one of its long, sinewy arms, propelling ourselves out over the beach like Tarzan. Sadly, despite being fitted with steel cables over the years, it hollowed out, and one day the town sprayed a bright orange X on its side. Then men came with a two-storey crane and buzz saws and cut it down, amputating its limbs one by one. My brothers saved a large chunk of its belly in the hopes of reincarnating it as a tabletop, but over time it rotted under a tarpaulin in the bushes and eventually got hauled away to the dump.

For years, the town has permitted memorial trees to be planted along the lakefront. It irked Mum that these saplings were congregating like a forest in front of her house, memorializing people she’d never met, threatening to block her view.

“They make us pay huge taxes for a lakefront view, and then they plant all these trees so we can’t see a damn thing!” She wanted to sneak out at night and hack all the saplings off at the knees, but her oxygen tubing wouldn’t reach that far.

It’s September now, close to Victor and Peni’s wedding, and the weather’s turning chilly. The lake still sparkles with dancing light, but the maple leaves are turning colour, adding syrupy golden hues to the fiery red of autumn. In the garden, Dad’s perennials have died down and folded inward, but the red impatiens—though taller and spindly and not quite so lush—are holding their own, just as we’d hoped.

The squirrels have started collecting their nuts. They’ve set up their bowling alley in the ceiling above the dining room as they do every fall, and I can hear their tiny feet scrabbling back and forth overhead. I also hear a strange vibration, like a faint humming, coming from the stains in the dining-room ceiling. I’m worried about the pipes again.

“Oh, jeez,” says Victor. “Now you’re hearing the walls hum? What have you been smoking?”

“Aren’t you worried about the plumbing?” I ask. “Your wedding is next week! What happens if the pipes burst just as all your guests are arriving?”

“So? I’ll invite a plumber to the wedding,” he laughs. “Get a grip!”

But the pipes don’t burst and nothing mars his wedding day.

While Victor and Peni are away on their honeymoon, our house buyer stops by frequently. I often find him early in the morning, Starbucks in hand, sitting on the public bench at the bottom of the road watching the sunrise over the lake. Sometimes I invite him to sit on the verandah. I relate to his sensitivity, but I want to know more about him—this man who will inhabit our space and inherit the layers of energy soaked into the walls. He answers my questions in vague, noncommittal ways and remains private and enigmatic. He seems
irresistibly drawn to the house, yet this seems implausible to me. He’s single, without children, so why would he want so many rooms?

I’ve set up a painting studio in the dining room, with light flooding in from all sides. His portrait is taking shape. I paint his youthful figure in a pensive mood, sitting on the steps in his leather bomber jacket and polished boots, staring out at the lake. He has handsome, chiselled features, his blond hair neatly combed to the side, and I get the feeling he’s meticulous: his shirts are always pressed, with button-down collars, and when I walk him to his polished car, it looks as if it just came from the BMW showroom; inside, there’s not a scrap of paper anywhere.