From This Moment On (27 page)

At last Kim hangs up the phone and reaches for my hands, and we sit down on the sofa, facing each other. I’m bursting at this point with a rush of anxiety over what I want to know but realize I’m not going to be able to handle. I can feel it coming on, and I just know it’s going to be bad.

Kim began to tell me very quietly but clearly that my parents had been in a terrible car accident. I jumped in with total panic. “Are they okay? What’s happening? Tell me!” This must have been incredibly difficult for him, to have to deliver such devastating news and answer my panicked questioning. He began to explain, but with several interruptions
from me, Kim couldn’t get it out fast enough for my racing thoughts. My mind was spinning, and I needed him to hurry up and tell me what I didn’t want to hear but had to know. I was a wreck waiting for news I deeply sensed was going to shock me. I probably could have guessed just from the somber sound of his voice and the strain in his eyes that the worst thing possible had happened.

When he finally said, “They were killed,” it was as if something burst inside of me, like an emotional explosion. I’m not sure how I appeared on the outside, but on the inside, I was erupting. My insides were rushing to empty out. Pain, rage, fear, confusion, and a crushing sadness deflated me as I sat there feeling it all drain from me. I remember very little from that moment on, but I was faintly aware of pounding Kim’s chest with my hands, shrieking that this could not be true. My mind was going to resist reality for as long as it could. Surely he would tell me that this was nothing more than a cruel joke, but he didn’t because it wasn’t.

I have no idea how long it took me to settle down enough to speak coherently.
My brothers. My sisters.
I needed to hear their voices, to know more. I managed to find my breath long enough to call my parents’ house on Montgomery Avenue, where Jill and Carrie were together. They passed the phone back and forth between them with me on the line as they tried to fill in whatever information they could. But we were all in shock and hysterical, as the conversation lurched back and forth, punctuated by wails and sobs.

Suddenly they whispered, “Darryl just walked in the door. He doesn’t know yet.” Poor Darryl, who had already lost his mother to suicide when he was just a baby. Seconds later, the most agonizing wail you can imagine pierced through me, the kind of haunting, wounded cry that rips your heart out and, though wordless, expresses utter despair. As I heard his cries, I couldn’t help but feel that the world was an awful place, that God couldn’t possibly exist, that compassion and goodness were gone forever.

Sitting four hundred miles away, with just a telephone receiver in my hand, I had never felt more helpless or alone. My desperation
to be with my family at that moment and knowing I couldn’t be overwhelmed me. I was grieving from a place so deep within that I could not bear it, crying inconsolably, like an abandoned baby. I did not know that it was humanly possible to hurt so viscerally and feel so empty.

Reflections of that night after the call to my sisters exist for me only in flashes: There I am in the Toronto, Indian Grove, house, sitting at the kitchen table—
How did I get from the living room to the kitchen?
—with the lovely girl from the apartment upstairs gently rubbing my back in large circles, encouraging me to drink the tea she had made me. But I just keep sobbing, lost in a haze of shock and disbelief.

Next I’m in the backseat of Kim’s car, hurtling through the night to Timmins. My friend and ex-roomie Michele sits up front with Kim so I might get some sleep across the backseat, but the minute I close my eyes, anxiety’s hands start choking me until I cannot breathe. Too terrified to be alone, I climb into the front seat.

The days back home in Timmins for the funeral are a blur, although I do remember placing a copy of one of my demo tapes in my mother’s coffin, so that she’d have my music with her wherever she was going. Oddly enough, calmness enveloped me once I viewed my parents in their caskets at the funeral home before the service. The coroner’s report noted that my mother died instantly from the impact of her forehead striking the dashboard. But other than a sizable lump and a gash, which had been partly covered with makeup, she bore no visible signs of having been in a fatal car accident. It came as some solace to know that at least she had not suffered.

My father’s injuries, too, were not apparent. According to the coroner’s report, he had suffered massive internal damage because of the steering column crushing his chest. The force from the collision had pushed in the vehicle’s front end on the driver’s side like an accordion, so that the steering wheel was left almost touching the back of the seat. Unlike my mother, though, he was still alive when the ambulance arrived and calling out for help. The medics rushed my
father and two other injured passengers, both Native North American employees of my parents’ reforestation company, to the hospital. It has always upset me that they decided to leave my mother behind. I understand their reasoning—she’d been declared dead at the scene, and the ambulance was already at capacity—but the image of her being left there alone in the bush, hunched over the dashboard, bleeding and lifeless, haunted me for a long time.

The details of the accident tortured me over and over again, as if the horror scene were stuck on repeat and I couldn’t find the remote to turn it off. It took quite a while before I finally found the off button, although the graphic images still flash in front of me from time to time, and the scene plays itself out as well.

My father died from internal injuries while on the way to the hospital. Apparently one of the injured workers regained consciousness long enough to ask, “Where’s the boy?” I can just imagine the medics wondering,
What boy?
“The boy,” he repeated. The fourteen-year-old son in the backseat. The medics promptly turned right around and raced back to the accident site. By now the sun was dipping below the horizon, and it took a while before they came upon Mark lying unconscious, quite a distance from the demolished vehicle. Upon impact, my brother had been thrown through the windshield of my father’s truck, landing out of sight, well off the side of the road. His injuries were not fatal, but if they hadn’t hurried back for him when they did, the bleeding and cold November air would have compromised his chances of survival. We were told that he was lucky.

Whatever peacefulness I felt in my parents’ presence at the funeral home might have been numbness more than anything else—and possibly some lingering denial—but I felt as though they were still with us, though in a different state. The permanence of their separation from us hadn’t sunk in. Not to be morbid, but I can remember thinking to myself very matter-of-factly,
Why can’t we just preserve them somehow and take them home?
I actually imagined setting up their caskets in the living room so that they could remain with us in this
state of permanent sleep. It seems strange to me now, but at the time, I was absolutely serious. It had all happened too fast, and I just was not ready to accept the finality of losing them forever.

Together we kids discussed what to have engraved on our parents’ tombstone. It’s surreal sitting around making a decision like this. How do you encapsulate the lives of two people and what they meant to you in just a few words? Even more challenging: how do you refer to two people who died together but barely lived their lives together without killing each other?

From the time I was little, I’d always worried that my father would someday kill my mother during one of their violent struggles, or that my mother would actually live out her contemplations about killing my father as the only way she felt she could escape their destructive relationship. I never took her seriously, never thought she would ever
really
kill him, but it was twisted, I thought, that she would go into detail about what method would work best. I warned her that if she ever killed him, it would be considered murder, and she would go to jail for life. I reminded her that we’d lose her forever. I recall genuinely feeling that fear, even though the intention of telling her that was more to calm her down and shake her back to reality. It was all crazy thinking, in my childhood point of view, and I tried to talk her out of thoughts that scared me and that I believed she was saying out of desperation, not sincerity, and that she wasn’t actually capable of it anyway.

So I couldn’t help but be struck by the irony that they had died together in the end as the result of a car accident. It was as if, despite everything, they had been destined to be together for eternity. So “Together Forever” were the words we chose to have engraved on their headstones.

After the funeral, I thought back to something my mother had told me only months before, when she was living near me in Toronto after having left my father yet again.

We were having one of our woman-to-woman talks, which I’d found so heartwarming, because it was as if our relationship was entering a new, richer dimension. We were laughing about something when suddenly my mom turned quiet.

“I have to tell you something,” she said hesitantly. I wasn’t at all prepared for what she was about to reveal.

Apparently, my mother had visited a fortune-teller/palm reader recently. “While reading my palm, the woman said that my husband would die this November, then suddenly told me that she could not finish my reading and closed my hand,” said my mother. Neither she nor I read anything too deep into this at the time, although we both thought it was peculiar and a bit creepy. My mother believed in fortune-tellers enough to go to one in the first place and she was uncomfortable that the woman had so abruptly stopped the reading, as though alarmed. I brushed it off for both our sakes, in an attempt to dampen any worry by saying, “Ah, superstition, that’s all this stuff is about. It’s really nothing to take seriously, Mom.” You can imagine my feelings when I reflected back on this after the accident, as exactly what the palm reader had foreseen had happened. My father did die that November, on the first. What the fortune-teller could not bring herself to say out loud was that my mother was fated to die along with my father. It was incredible to me that this palm reader could be right, that she must have been for real. I was impressed by the reality that the phenomenon of clairvoyance really existed. This lady did see something that freaked her out, causing her to not finish reading my mother’s palm. Today, rather than being impressed with this skill, I’m more wary of its reality, and personally prefer not to know my future, the future of the ones I love, or even of the world I live in or of mankind. That doesn’t mean I am passive regarding the welfare of others or my role as a citizen of the world, but I believe that ultimately our Creator has it all planned out perfectly, whether I agree with the plan or not. Regardless whether I’m aware of what that plan is, it is not for me to alter it in any way, and I would therefore not want to experience
unnecessary suffering and anxiety over potentially devastating information I cannot change.
Why do that to yourself if you genuinely have faith in God’s ability to manage what He created?
is my thinking.

In the weeks after our parents’ burial, I remained in Timmins with my siblings to help with the family responsibilities and my parents’ personal and professional affairs, which were beginning to build up with each passing day.

Kim returned to the house on Indian Grove after the funeral, and as it soon turned out, I would not be joining him anytime soon. One day, feeling overwhelmed by everything I had to deal with, I called Kim seeking a little moral support.

“Why are you calling me?” he asked icily.

Huh?

Then he simply told me never to call him again. The end.

His ruthlessness and, frankly, his timing blindsided me. I was so mired in grief and wrung out emotionally that all I could manage was a meek “Okay.” Under ordinary circumstances, I would have felt humiliated—and probably irate at being treated so shabbily. But now I had heavier burdens to bear than a bruised ego.

Jill was the oldest sibling, but she was engaged to be married and had moved out of town. Being the oldest left in the house, I assumed the role of handling the grim details of my parents’ estate. They had left no will. The most pressing issues facing us were establishing guardianship of Mark and Darryl, the business affairs of Sharont Enterprises (the name of my parents’ company: “Sharon” plus the
t
for the first letter in “Twain”), and paying personal and corporate taxes. There was also the distressing matter of having to sit and review with attorneys the coroner’s reports and details of the accident, because, technically, it was my father’s fault.
That
was a hard reality to process.

My father was driving a Chevy Suburban truck, a forerunner of the sport-utility vehicle. It had front and backseats and a covered storage area as big as that of a pickup truck. In all, a large, heavy
vehicle, with room for nine plus gear. He and my mother were transporting two of their men along the Trans-Canada Highway to a town called Wawa, about 170 miles west of Timmins. The men were to meet a helicopter there and bring food supplies to the bush camp.

About two-thirds of the way en route to the helicopter site near the town of Chapleau, my father was driving along a winding gravel road, into the sun, which was low in the sky. As best as the police could determine, the glare most likely blinded him just as he came up over a slight ridge. He saw the oncoming transport, but too late. It’s probable that he overreacted and braked abruptly, which sent the Suburban skidding head-on into the other vehicle. Brake marks in the gravel determined that he did in fact see the transport and reacted, but it’s very difficult to stop abruptly on a gravel surface, which is slippery like ice.

The concept of the cycle of life and death, and the realization of how my parents were a part of it, resonated through me with a deafening ring, like the sound of crashing metal, I imagined, that echoed through the bush when the two vehicles collided. It rattled me to consider that while they were still alive that summer and fall, my parents were replacing the very trees that would soon be loaded and transported by a truck they crashed into only weeks later.
Out with the old, in with the new,
I thought, was life’s cruel way of cycling and recycling. They planted new life to replace the old trees that would kill them. It was a twisted way of thinking, but my mind was in an unusual state of confusion. I didn’t know whether to be angry or sad, who to blame, if there was, in fact, anyone to blame, and I had no answers to anything other than the police report stating that my father was technically at fault.