After (5 page)

«
Mi padre es marinero.
»

«
¡Muy bien!
»

I had said, “My father
is
a sailor,” instead of “
was
” I couldn’t say my father was dead even though the whole class knew the truth, and Houston and Caroline and Eric and Melanie had all been to my father’s funeral. They would have had to have some sort of group amnesia to have missed the big news that my father had committed suicide. I was Son of Suicide Man. I could picture the
cartoon on TV:
Suicide Man Against the Terrible Smiley Face, Suicide Man and the Magic Rope in the Attic
, Ugly thoughts. Unbelievably, nobody ever mentioned that Spanish class to me. I was grateful.

At our school people sniff out differences like killer sharks going for blood. You’re supposed to be free to express yourself, but you’d better be the same as everybody else–or else. You’d think I was used to being different because we were poorer than my friends. I’d never been one of those kids who could afford expensive clothes, and have the latest gizmos as soon as they came out. We didn’t have a second home in Florida or a cottage in the Laurentians. We didn’t have a boat or a second car in the driveway. Nothing like that. We didn’t even have a computer. Still, being poor was not as big a deal as being Son of Suicide Man. Now, that was something different. Looking back, maybe the other kids teased me or talked about me behind my back, but to tell you the truth, if they did, I didn’t notice. Grief is an anesthetic, but I don’t recommend it.

One night as I lay in bed staring at the barren stretch of ceiling, a new thought started to gnaw at me. What if my mother died too? What would happen to me and Luc? I left my door open to listen for any creaks on the stairs, in case my mother was headed for the attic.

One day Maman was fifteen minutes late coming home from the post office where she worked. She tried to get as much overtime as she could, but she always called me to let me know. This time she didn’t.

My whole body shook as I pressed the buttons on the phone. “Hi! Is Lisa Gregory still there?”

“No, sorry. She left, maybe ten minutes ago.”

“Are you sure she’s not there?”

“Yes, I am. Sorry about that. Is it urgent?”

“No, no. It’s Francis, her son.”

“Oh! Hi, Francis! How are you?”

“Fine.”

Fine
was apparently the right word to say, even though I felt anything but fine. I turned on both the radio and the TV, in case there was news of an accident. Now that my father was dead, any calamity was possible. I thought that if Maman had died, I would die too. All I had in the world was her and my little Luc. The thought of losing either of them was unbearable.

I finally saw her car turn into the driveway. I can’t describe the relief. She threw her bag and her keys on the hall table, like a baseball player throwing a ball with all of his strength. She sat down on the bottom stair to take off her winter boots. There had been an early snowfall.

I wanted to yell:
Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been!
Instead, I said, “Maman, I made vegetable soup for you and Luc.”

“That’s nice, but I’m not hungry, honey.” She sounded exhausted.

“You have to eat something, Maman.”

“I will, dear, later.”

It was always the same thing. Later. She didn’t eat anymore. Each night, she would stand at the kitchen counter peeling onions–maybe to be able to cry in front of us without having to hide her tears. Her frantic cleaning of the summer was over. After she put the food on the table and fed Sputnik, she would go into the living room and sit watching the fire in the fireplace until she fell asleep on the couch, Papa’s wool vest clutched in her arms.

I cleaned up the kitchen quietly and put Luc to bed. In those days I was trying my best to be good. I wanted to show everyone how strong I was, even if deep down I wanted to collapse and disappear under the ugly living room rug forever.

Snow muffled the trees and roofs like a white shroud. I had started getting stuck on words, wanting to say them or write them over and over. You won’t be surprised to learn that
shroud
was one of those words. This time it fit.

Luc brought home a form letter from kindergarten advising us that he would be a lamb in the Christmas pageant. The teacher had added a hand-written note that we were not to worry. There was a leftover lamb costume from last year’s Easter pageant.

“When are we getting the Christmas tree?” he asked at supper.

“I don’t know,” said Maman. She looked at me with a slight shake of her head. The Christmas decorations were neatly packed in a box we kept in the attic. No one had been up to the attic since Papa died there. “I just don’t know.”

Though we didn’t talk about my father he was everywhere in the house. Each room was rich with memories: the kitchen table that could instantly be transformed into a card table, that hideous living room carpet that turned into a perfect wrestling mat, the brown sofa cushions that morphed into the most comfortable tent in the whole world.

“Francis, there’s a call for you.” Maman shouted up from the living room without moving from the couch.

“Who is it?”

“Houston.”

“Tell him I’m busy.” Five minutes later Maman knocked on my door. I was staring at a page in a Superman comic instead of studying math. Let me take this opportunity to mention once again how very much I hate math. It is supposed to be logical, but nothing in life is logical. I also hate math class because Houston sits right in front of me
and he spends every possible second clowning around for Caroline’s benefit. All that stupid childish stuff was getting on my nerves.

Maman opened my door carefully, as if she was afraid it might be booby-trapped.

“Are you mad at Houston? He’s called five times in the last two days, and you always say that you are busy.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Houston was your best friend. Now you won’t talk to him or anyone else. What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you have an argument? Did he say something?”

“There’s nothing wrong! Leave me alone.”

She shut the door quickly. From behind it, she said:

“Well… I don’t know what to say…. If you want to talk to me, you know that you can, sweetheart, Maman is here. I love you, honey.”

Of course I knew that I could talk to her, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to cry in front of her. I thought that if I cried, she would too and we’d never stop. The plain truth was that I didn’t want to talk to Houston because he loved a good laugh, and because he still had his father.

I was walking around with this big ugly thing inside my chest that actually hurt. Whoever came up with the image of being brokenhearted really knew what he was talking about. A nice twist of the knife is, that just when you need to distract yourself with books or with music or
with movies or with your friends, you can’t. The pain fills up every nook and cranny of your mind, and you can’t focus on the things you used to enjoy. You end up feeling completely alone.

I wasn’t about to dump any of this sick stuff on Luc. He was just a baby. As long as he had
Sesame Street
and Sputnik and Aunt Sophie he seemed to be fine, but who knows? My friends didn’t get it either. Here’s what my friends knew about pain: not much. Caroline’s idea of pain was having a crush on a person who was obviously much more interested in being a moody poet in a black turtleneck and who listened to Bob Dylan than he was in her. Houston’s emotional state rose and fell with the fortunes of the Montréal Expos. As for Eric, who was a short redhead with a pug nose and braces, in his heart he was a Mississippi blues man who carried the woes of the world on his shoulders. But he had no idea about loss. Even the dog he got when he was a little kid was still alive. As for Melanie, it’s hard to know what went on in the mind of Serial Giggler. She could laugh for Canada. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some kind of monster who wanted my friends to suffer. I knew in my head that I used to have a riot with them, but it was like someone drained all the color out of being in their company.

You’d think that in the Larger Fish Tank of School, there’d be other kids in my boat, but I didn’t know any. There was a girl, Sydney, in my biology class, whose
parents got a divorce that was so ugly it made the newspapers. There were other kids whose parents had divorced in a less dramatic way, but I didn’t know anyone whose father or mother had died. I was ashamed to say that my father was dead. I was ashamed to say he committed suicide. I didn’t want to be seen as an extraterrestrial of some kind.

Here’s some advice: steer clear of canned Christmas cheer if you’re feeling down. It will kill you. Right after school on the first Friday of December, I went to the mall. It was lousy with Christmas cheer. Over the loud speaker Bing Crosby sang “White Christmas” three times in a row. I was walking down the electronics aisle at Canadian Tire when I thought I saw my father. He wore a coat like Papa’s, and combed his hair the same way. I followed him, but he kept disappearing between the rows of blenders and tool kits. Finally, I turned into an aisle and there he was, reaching for a toaster. I could see his face. It wasn’t Papa.