They Left Us Everything (34 page)

“We have to view this as a conversation,” I reason. “It would be insulting not to respond.”

“We’re miles apart,” says Victor, “and I’m not prepared to give it away.”

“Let’s just shave a hair off and see what he does.”

Over the next twenty-four hours the offer goes back and forth, with Clive inching up and us inching down. Victor polls Chris and Robin to find out what their bottom line is. When Clive delivers his final offer, it’s tantalizingly close. We have no way of knowing whether he’ll move in or resell it, but the clincher for me is knowing how well Clive will care for this house. Alex tells us he has a reputation for beautiful restorations. More importantly, I feel Mum and Dad would have approved. We accept Clive’s offer with a long closing—June. This gives us four more months to say goodbye to Point O’ View. I paint another portrait—this time of Clive—but not until the deal is inked. One day, I take down Mum’s portrait in the pantry and hang Clive in her place: I’m finally pressing the “eject” button.

When I speak to Chris on the phone in B.C., I tell him I won’t feel sad to leave; it’s time for a new young family to cherish it. It feels right. We’re at the end of a life cycle and a new one is beginning. I tell him how happiness has flooded me in this house this past year, how creative energy has rushed through me the way it did in childhood.

“Maybe that’s Mum’s gift to you,” he says. “Maybe she wanted to give you this while she was alive; she just didn’t know how.”

It’s been just over a year since Mum died. The lake is gently stippled by a soft breeze, and even though it’s the end of February, which I’d normally describe as the depths of winter, it looks as beautiful as spring. Black squirrels are running along the fence and jumping between the bare branches of the maple tree, sparrows are pecking at the lawn, geese float quietly on the surface of the water, and the swans are back.

We’ve finally untangled the mess—and given everything a new home, a task that turned out to be much harder yet much more rewarding than I ever anticipated.

I come eyeball to eyeball with a tiny mouse in the kitchen cupboard this morning. His head pops up beneath a grimy paper towel in the garbage, and his tiny nose twitches. He eyes me sideways. Instead of shrieking and rushing for a mousetrap, I feel tender towards him. Shouldn’t he eat, too? I close the cupboard door to give him some privacy. I hear him scurry back down the hole by the sink pipes to his family.

I go out on the verandah with my coffee, leaving the door unlatched, and when I come back inside I find the stray black cat by the table, crouched below the picture of the smiling girl. The cat’s eyes freak me out: they seem to pull me into orbs of infinity and I’m reminded of Mum’s look on her last day. Has she come back already—as a cat? I follow the cat’s gaze to the girl’s impudent, gutsy expression.

Of course this is Mum. Who else could have jumped off
the Eiffel Tower? Why did it take me so long to recognize her? Was I afraid to see that she looks like me?

I think of all the adventures Mum experienced in her life and the richness I absorbed by extension. I remember her exuberance, how much she loved life. She valued every second. Not a detail of her amazing life was wasted—she could recall it all, until the day she died. The crankiness during her final years is receding from my memory. I have replaced the lens through which I view her. I have more empathy. I’m experiencing some aches and pains myself, and I see now that old people are simply young people locked into aging bodies. No wonder she was cranky. Now I view her with more understanding and gratitude. I can remember all the enthusiastic support she gave me throughout my life. I’m beginning to wish I could have been more like her. I wish I had her derring-do.

I call Pat. “I know why I needed to spend so much time in this house,” I tell her. “It wasn’t about untangling the stuff—it was about untangling myself from Mum. The clutter wasn’t hers … it was mine.”

“Yes!” she says. “We all need to make the break at some point, and it takes courage … you just waited until the end.”

“Why couldn’t I find the courage earlier?” I say, shaking my head sadly at the memory. “Why didn’t I break away as a teenager, like most smart people?”

“Your mother was too powerful. Mine was, too—it was impossible to break away from my mother until the end because she wouldn’t let me.”

“I was too obedient,” I say.

“Of course! We have no one to blame but ourselves.”

“But where was my compassion in her final years? Why couldn’t I handle her crankiness?”

“Mothers are always ‘The Nurturer’ and ‘The Witch,’ whether we like it or not,” says Pat. “I’m both to my children … and you’re both to your children—just as your mother was to you. We have to accept both in the same package.” Then Pat laughs as if she’s just discovered the joke. “It’s all projection, anyway!” Her delightful high-pitched laugh tinkles away like a run of musical notes.

Before we hang up, Pat says, “There aren’t many people who could have gone on your journey. You may be more like your mother than you think!”

For the first time in my life I take it as a compliment.

It’s been a long spring, moody and wet, but the torrential rains have produced a silver lining: the lawns are emerald green and the gardens lush. Dad’s daffodils are blooming, their sunburst yellow heads poking out of deep lumpy blankets of blue forgetme-nots. Lake breezes shake the tall stalks of purple phlox and carry to the verandah waves of perfume from the lilac hedges.

I tell Robert Baines that he can have the big old dresser with the secret drawer, so the following week he rushes out with a moving van. While he’s here, I give him the remaining dining-room chairs and anything else we can find that once belonged to his great-grandfather. There’s one more item that came with the house, but I doubt he’d want it—it looks like a coffin. I take him up the back stairs to the now-empty trunk room and point to a narrow, ten-foot-long box cowering in a corner under the eaves. He drags it into the light. The hinged lid is covered in a padded green material.

“Do you mind if I peel back some of the cloth?” asks
Robert. He takes a key out of his pocket and rips a slit in the lining. The material is rotten, and when we give it a tug the whole sheet tears away in a cloud of dust.

“Well, what do you know!” he says, shaking his head. Scribbled in pencil on the inside lid is a row of Christian names. “Those are my aunts and uncles … this must have been their toy chest or something!”

Happily, he hoists the box into the van and drives his treasures back into the city.

Our neighbour Dick Rampen brings me the plastic mould he’s made from the fox-head gate latch and we send it to a factory in China to make replicas in cast iron. Everyone seems to want one, including the new owners. The Baines family orders five.

We put all the dregs in the garage, and I write an ad for exactly the kind of garage sale my mother would have loved to attend:

Antique furniture, collectibles, lamps, vintage steamer trunks, 1950s magazines, Telefunken stereo, LPs, wicker rocker, framed prints & original art, dishes, glassware, cutlery, Persian rugs, old tools, vases, mini-fridge, etc. All priced to sell.

Grandchildren come out for the day to help do the selling. Dealers arrive early to scoop up the good stuff. A neighbour buys Dad’s old wicker rocker and carries it around the corner where she puts it on her back porch. I can see it from the kitchen window and it fills me with happiness. The next shift—women on walkers, younger than Mum but older than
me—buy up all the picture frames, salad bowls, and out-of-date atlases. We even manage to sell a naked Barbie.

Dad’s 1912 Nordheimer piano is a collector’s item and still carries a tune, but we have trouble finding a buyer. I resist the temptation to take it apart and hang its beautiful cast-bronze, harp-shaped guts on the wall of my house as a piece of art, but I do rescue one of the steamer trunks—the small black metal one with Mum’s maiden initials painted in gold under the lock, the one she took to war.

My six-week plan to sort through clutter has taken sixteen months. On a sunny May afternoon, my brothers return and we hold a tea party on the verandah for friends—including the Baines—to say goodbye. After they leave, my brothers and I hold our last Sibling Supper. In the big, empty house, with the dining-room table gone, we sit around a card table, nibble on pizza, and disperse some final odds and ends we’ve found: a lock of baby blond hair in a box (but whose?), a Victorian watch fob, and a rolled-up aerial photo of Oporto, Portugal, showing Dad’s family home before it was torn down to make way for the main bridge across the River Douro.

At the end of the evening, we go outside in the twilight to stumble backwards around the outside perimeter of the house. Robin calls it the “Hong Kong Farewell” and reminds us that all departing governors general used to do this—drive backwards three times around Government House in Hong Kong to say goodbye. Robin says it realigns the feng shui.

Victor refuses to participate. He reminds us that Robin always makes up stuff like this, and he sits huffing impatiently
in his car with the headlights on in the darkened street. Laughing, Robin, Chris, and I, holding hands, stumble backwards single file through the garage and down the path beside the old sandbox; past Dad’s hollyhock beds, the outdoor clothesline, and the laundry room door; then across the side of the pool, up the hill to the verandah, through the garden gate to the front door, and back to where we started. We pretend Sandy is with us.

As we pass the streetlight, Victor leans out of his car window. “Hey, just for the record … in case anybody comes by … I’m not related to any of you—okay? You’re all out of your friggin’ minds! And did Plum tell you she hears the walls humming? I swear to God, she’s been living here way too long!”

We look up at the flag: it ripples and snaps. We had decided not to lower it tonight; neighbours might think there’s been another death in the family.

It feels like that.

This house with its setting is part of me, seared into my bones like fossil on rock. It’s more a true ancestor than any of those we never met. It’s held our blood in its veins: some of us have been born here, married here, and died here. Nothing can ever take it away.

I can’t resist taking one more walk-through.

I am now seeing the house empty, exactly the way my mother first saw it all those years ago when she was thirty-six years old, standing here, imagining all its possibilities and the love she could breathe into a life for us here. I realize that Mum
was
the house, and all this time she’s been speaking to me.

I listen to the waves lapping rhythmically against the shore, like the beating of my mother’s heart, and I hear, “Nothing lasts forever,
Darling
, but this ... this is
everything
.”

One Last Look