Anyway — yes — Trevor had been weeping. That was even the word he used, and uttering it made his freckled face and neck flush pink. Irene had been waiting to greet him in the foyer, because she saw the truck pull in, but when he didn’t come inside, she came to find him. He’d spent the previous week in what he called “talks” with his wife. The talks had started Saturday night after Trevor had gone out of his way to set up a “date night” because he felt like things had not been so romantic with them lately. But when the hour approached and he started prodding her to get ready to go, Leanne said she didn’t want to. She was tired, she’d been working extra shifts, and she said that going out with Trevor to try and be romantic just felt like more shift work piled on top of everything else she had to do. He apologized sarcastically that she found him “a chore.” She said she didn’t find him a chore, but lately she found being married a chore. Trevor said he was trying to make marriage fun, goddamnit, that’s what this entire fucking date night was about, and if she would come out on the goddamn fucking date she would see just how much fun they could have. Leanne said why didn’t Trevor go out and have fun by himself, and she would stay home and rest because that was all she wanted, really, was some rest. Trevor barked, Good then! And went out, as Leanne suggested, but he did not have fun.

  He sat in a bar and stared, unblinking, at a curling game (which he interrupted himself agitatedly to insist was not even a real sport because real sports did not use brooms) on the bar’s big-screen TV. He knew that something new had happened. Leanne had often been tired, she had often not wanted to do things with him, including having sex, but she had never come out and said a thing like their marriage was a chore. It sounded like a small thing, a nasty little throwaway line of the sort that so-called romantic partners have flicked, booger-like, at one another since the dawn of time. But this was not the sort of thing Trevor and Leanne ever said to one another. It represented a new frontier in their relationship — a definitive shift. Trevor sat there on his stool, one hand braced against the bar, face rigid, everything rigid, afraid to move a muscle. Because he knew the floor was dropping out from underneath him. He knew the future — the life he had and was supposed to have with Mike and Leanne — was in the process of going away. Becoming something else. He tried to tell himself that it was nothing — a minor argument. The husband hits the bar to blow off steam, the wife broods in front of the TV, and later they come together in bed, whisper apologies, however grudging, and life goes on. But life wasn’t going to go on. Something had been set into motion, like when a few stray pebbles come sprinkling down from a mountaintop before the entire south face slides into the valley below. And maybe if Trevor just sat very still, alone at the bar, he could keep the trembling precipice from giving way.

  A few days later, the side of the mountain had come down and he and Leanne were separating although he still couldn’t claim to understand why. No one had cheated. No one had maxed out the credit cards and tried to hide it. No one had any objections to the way anyone else had been parenting Mike. As far as Trevor could determine Leanne was walking out because their marriage made her — for reasons she couldn’t even properly articulate no matter how late they stayed up talking and ranting and pacing and sitting with their heads in their hands — sad.

  Trevor took a big slurp from his glass and blinked up at the ceiling a few times. His freckles seemed to glow in the lamp light. He looked worn out, like a tired little boy.

  “My biggest regret,” he said after a moment. “I never introduced your mom to Mike.”

  “You never brought him over?”

  “I can’t explain it,” said Trevor. “For the longest time, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want — you know. The two worlds to collide. Mike was part of everything that was going on with Leanne. Not that any of it was his fault. But your mom. And this house . . .”

  “I get it,” I said. To teenage me the house had been a steel trap. But to Trevor, like Jessica before him, it was a sanctuary. Fresh bread and lavender. Tea and sympathy. Kelli and Irene.

  “Your mom told me,” said Trevor, looking down at the table, “you had a pretty bad breakup yourself.”

  It was as if he had reached out and pressed a button on my body — or a bruise. It made me wince but it didn’t exactly make me feel defensive.

  “She said she wished you were around for me to talk to,” he continued. “Guess she figured we could compare notes.”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again, because I was worried I’d say something that sounded disparaging of Irene in that moment — for example, She knew? She cared? We only spoke a handful of times during my breakup period, and I couldn’t remember much about it except for a flurry of exchanged fines. I also remember feeling shamed, braced for an I told you so, even though I told you so’s had never really been my mother’s style. Still, I felt like I could hear it in her every inconsequential word about Kelli’s latest doctor’s appointment or what St. Joseph’s had in store for their annual Easter pageant that year.

  But maybe I had been hearing something else. As much as I tried to keep it to myself during those phone calls, how desolate and unmoored I felt, perhaps Irene had understood. What I remember most is a fuzzy, panicked feeling of not knowing where I stood anymore. A dream I had stands out in my mind — and dreams and days were hard to differentiate back then, but this had to be a dream, because I walked into a room of our house which he had used for an office and found it flooded with summer daylight. The roof had blown off. I figured it must have happened in a storm — a storm I must have slept through, because I’d never noticed it raging. On the one hand, I considered, this couldn’t be a good thing, the roof blowing off the house. I didn’t know how to deal with it, logistically — whom to call, where to begin. On the other hand, it was a beautiful day. Birds and treetops overhead.

  It had to do, I think now, with freedom’s sudden anarchy — the way freedom can descend upon your life, out of nowhere, a tornado touching down. Abrupt, unasked for, but freedom nonetheless and therefore accompanied by, even in the holy mess it leaves behind, a germ of exhilaration.

  It was so unexpected, maybe, because I’d always thought of getting married as the thing that gave me freedom, not the thing from which I would one day be emancipated. A husband was a get-out-of-jail-free card, I thought on some level, a fail-safe, because how could I be dragged into the mire of Kelli-servitude alongside my mother if I had a husband? (“To look after” seems like it should be the final clause of that sentence but, of course, the idea was not to have to look after anyone. It was more about attaching myself to a legally binding anchor of sorts. Securely lodged. Immovable.)

  And maybe Irene knew all this. In fact, it occurred to me as I sat blinking across from Trevor: of course she did. She knew I’d lost my get-out-of-jail-free card. And likely she’d known from the beginning what an idiocy it was to think of a marriage — of all things — as such. My stomach clenched miserably with fresh bereavement. It felt as if Irene had died all over again, right there in the kitchen, in my arms. My mother had known what I was going through, I realized, the entire time. Because my mother was no fool. She felt it. She got it. And I could have come home. I could have spoken with her. I could have asked for her comfort, and she would have given it to me. She would have. But now she was not here. Only Trevor was here now — her ruddy, big-shouldered avatar. Her chosen son.

  22

  The dishes still were not cleared and Kelli had long ago left the table to sit at her perch by the window. But it was late now, going on ten. I knew this because I could hear Kelli making the soft, inquisitive noises she always made when it was time for her before-bed snack of toast and peanut butter (a bit of chuckling and intermittently whispered Kelli-toas’ ). It felt to me like a good time to take a breather, as talking with Trevor about our mutual end-of-marriage crucibles had left me feeling raw, like I was being peeled open one strip of flesh at a time.

  After Kelli was in bed, we carried our juice glasses into the living room and flopped down into opposite chairs from one another. I felt like we both should be exhausted by this point in the conversation, but there was something about having laid ourselves so emotionally bare that was sort of exciting. More than exciting, actually — thrilling. Thrilling because it was so dangerous, I think now.

  So finally I understood why Trevor had been so weird and why Trevor had been so pushy and why Trevor had so much trouble negotiating boundaries when it came to Kelli and me. I had been a stranger. A stranger Trevor had nonetheless loved, because he loved Irene. But at the same time, the stranger who arrived at Irene’s deathbed and swiftly took over the house and the care of Kelli once Irene was in the ground. It had been disorienting for Trevor. After over a year of cozy nights in front of Irene’s big-screen TV, of family barbecues on Irene’s back deck and afternoons of yard work and plates of cookies and intimacies exchanged over multiple mugs of tea, Trevor was yanked back into the role of Professional Caregiver, for whom an overly familiar relationship with his clients would be a Fire-able Offence. It made his head spin. Trevor now had to back off from the family that had become his family and pretend like the previous year had never happened. And who knew what the daughter from the city would turn out to be like? The moment she caught a whiff of his relationship with Rini, she could report him, and he would lose his job. And never see Kelli again.

  Trevor had been so weird because Trevor had been pretending he wasn’t grieving.

  It was midnight before I could ask the question. I was curled up in the loveseat near Kelli’s perch, which allowed me to gaze occasionally out the window at the golden pools the streetlights cast along the sidewalk. The street was very quiet, as it had been — or at least as it had appeared to me to be — the night Mr. Gill’s garage was vandalized. From where I sat I had a perfect view of his house. He’d installed a large, bright spotlight above his garage — an eye-watering LED that glared, unblinking, throughout the night.

  We held our drinks in our laps and I was relieved to be able to nurse mine now. Trevor was too far away, seated in my mother’s rocking chair on the opposite side of the coffee table, to swoop in and top me off. He’d brought the rum and cola along and, efficiently, had even filled a cereal bowl with ice cubes so we wouldn’t have to get up and go to the kitchen when it came time to freshen our drinks.

  I’d been sipping but now I took a gulp and felt the fizz and liquor burn a slow trail down my throat and sit glowing in the pit of my stomach.

  “Did my mother,” I said, “ever talk to you about me?”

  Trevor leaned back and the springs of the old cushioned rocking chair he was sitting in thrummed. He sipped his drink and for a moment seemed to be looking around for a cup holder in the armrest. When he couldn’t find it, he cradled the drink in front of his crotch.

  “Well, Miss Karie —”

  “Could you start calling me Karen?”

  Trevor’s face went blank. “I don’t know if I could,” he said, startled.

  “It’s my name,” I said. “To be honest the ‘Miss’ thing drives me a little . . . I don’t like it.”

  “It’s just —” said Trevor. “I always feel a bit strange calling ladies by their first name. Feels a little . . . informal.”

  This made me smile. Trevor, whose problem was that he presumed too much, gave the women in his life these twee little nicknames because he didn’t want to be presumptuous.

  “You can be informal with me,” I said. “I just found out you’re basically my secret brother — you can call me by my name.”

  “Karen,” said Trevor, frowning. I knew what he was thinking, and he was right. It didn’t work.

  “Or,” I said, “why don’t you just keep calling me Karie. Like Kelli does.”

  Trevor nodded. He still looked uneasy, but Karie was clearly better. “Good-good,” he said, then tried it out. “Karie.”

  And then he said it in a different way. “Karie,” he began. I looked up from my drink and he was leaning forward in the chair now, holding his juice glass between his knees, face sombre, about to tell me what I’d asked to know.

  * * *

  At first, Irene’s daughter Karen was something of a stock character in Trevor’s mind. Not a villain, exactly, but definitely a variety of jerk. Rini would mention her from time to time and Trevor, unconsciously, built himself a picture based on his own assumptions intermingled with the vague details Irene sometimes passed along. For example, the daughter lived in Toronto, so that was pretty much a strike against her right there. Toronto, as every east coast Canadian is raised to understand, is where the nation’s arseholes congregate. It is a place for people who care only about work — but not even real work. Not construction, or the fisheries, but some vague, glad-handy business that takes place in office towers and requires the wearing of suits and a lot of insincere smiling and shaking of hands. Such people live in towers identical to the towers in which they work. They spend what little free time they have shuttling themselves from one tower to the next, existing at the gloomy heart of a cluster of such towers, where the rays of the sun can never reach them. They don’t have fields or backyards, because fields and backyards are places for picnics and barbecues, friends and families. And these people may have friends — insincerely grinning, glad-handy friends exactly like themselves — but they don’t have families. And they don’t have families, one supposes, because they don’t have souls.

  Not that Irene described her city-dwelling daughter in such terms, but Trevor, as we know, had a habit of presumption. From Irene he gleaned merely: A City Person. Work That Kept Her Busy. No Kids and Over Forty. And so a picture developed in Trevor’s mind.

  And speaking of pictures, Trevor got to see a few. This was once things got cozy between him and Irene, once he found himself coming over fairly regularly for dinners, spending an hour or two in Kelli’s recliner-throne downstairs afterwards to catch the occasional hockey game. (And some nights, I learned, if he’d had more than a couple of beers, Irene would even insist he stay the night in the spare room downstairs.) One such evening, Irene was keeping him company, working on her photo albums as Trevor watched the game. When “Coach’s Corner” came on, he muted it and wandered over to the couch where Irene was sitting to peer at the snapshots she’d been chuckling over. He remembered two in particular.

  There was the snapshot from Kelli’s twentieth birthday party — me with my arms wrapped tightly around her as Kelli laughed but, being Kelli, simultaneously pulled away. I was wearing a party hat on either side of my head, like colourful conical horns. “You looked like fun,” said Trevor. “You didn’t look like the person I’d been imagining.” I had been drunk, I remembered. I’d been taking nips of something in my room in anticipation of the dance I was planning to meet my friends at once I’d finished having cake with Kelli and Irene.

  The other photo Trevor remembered was one from Halloween, ten years earlier, the two of us scowling in the kitchen, side by side, about to tear each other’s heads off. I had insisted, despite my mother’s warnings, that Kelli and I go trick-or-treating as Siamese twins — and this, of course, had been a disaster. Five minutes after Irene had wrestled us into our shared costume and snapped the photo, we were screaming at each other and Kelli was dragging me across the room — she in one leg of our oversized pair of twin-pants, me helpless in the other — so she could sit at the window and rock her aggravation away. I ended up going out trick-or-treating myself, wearing the giant costume, one empty pant-leg flying in my wake, explaining to people I was a Siamese twin whose sibling had just been surgically cut away — and that I was “so much happier now.”

  “You were cute kids,” offered Trevor. “The two of you standing there, all pissed off.” He was being kind, softening me up for what was to come.

  “But you must’ve thought,” I blurted, “I was such a bad daughter to Irene.”

  Trevor leaned back and considered his words. “I just wondered where you were. Your mother —”

  I jerked forward. “My mother never told me anything.” I knew I sounded like I was pleading. “I checked in with her every month . . . or so. She never told me what was going on. I asked. But, I mean, she was so shut down. I didn’t push. I should’ve. We were both shut down. We had this fight when I was twenty and we never really —”

  “She told me about the fight,” said Trevor.

  Now I leaned back. “She did?”

  “And I said to her, Rini, for Jesus’ sake, pardon my French. The girl was twenty years old when you had that spat. Do you know how much stupid shit I was going around spouting when I was twenty?”

  “And you said that because,” I said slowly, “she still hadn’t forgiven me for what I said back then.”

  Trevor leaned over to place his drink on the coffee table.

  “Miss — sorry. Karie. Karie. You two — ok, I’m gonna tell you what I said to her. You just forgot how to talk to each other after that. You hurt each other’s feelings so bad you spent the rest of your lives trying not to do it again. So you both ended up just not saying anything for the next twenty years.”

 

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