I Was There the Night He Died (8 page)

Picking up the remote and clicking on the TV, “Let's check out
NHL on the Fly
, Dad,” I say. “The Wings are at home to Colorado. It's not the rivalry it used to be, but you know as well as I do that both of them still hate to lose to the other one more than to just about anybody else. This could be a good one.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Five

 

 

 

Waiting your turn for the next
available customer service representative at the bank is like standing in line at customs or waiting in your car to cross the border: even if you haven't done anything wrong, it sure feels like you have. Today is Customer Appreciation Day at CIBC, but the cold coffee and warm orange juice and broken sugar cookies don't make me feel any more appreciated.

A strikingly plain, fiftyish woman, hand extended like a shark fin, is headed directly for me. I stand up before she arrives, hope she's here to welcome me and nothing else. “Mr. Samson,” she says, and we shake hands.

“Would you like to come this way, then?” She directs me toward the rear of the bank, where several white cubicles without nameplates resemble a human honeycomb of bureaucracy, each worker bee invisible to the eye but clear to the ear, a steady clatter of keyboard tapping and telephone yakking accompanying us to our appointed cell at the very back. An opened palm indicates where I'm supposed to sit. I feel like a herded farm animal who's reached his final, fatal destination. I sit.

“I understand you have some questions regarding your father's account.”

“The nursing home where he's at claims they haven't been receiving the monthly transfer of his expenses for quite awhile now. They get his OAS and CPP cheques directly from the government, but his pension money from the factories he worked at make up the difference of what he owes them. My Uncle Donny was supposed to make sure this was all set up. Which he did. Which it is. Which it was, I mean.” I'm starting to confuse even myself. I point at the computer—this is a woman who clearly appreciates the value of the hand gesture. “Can you just tell me what's going on with his account?”

“Certainly.” And with that her fingers attack the keyboard with a precise ferocity, hardly slowing down even when she glances at the manila folder open on the desk. I make books for a living yet type with two fingers. If I had her job, I wouldn't make it past lunch time of my first day. A good novel is full of all sorts of people convincingly doing all of the things that people do, but it only takes a ten-minute stroll outside your study to be reminded how utterly useless a writer is at anything except explaining the world to itself. Writers are practically Masonic in their insistence upon the difficulty of the writing life, but all except the most arrogantly entitled know that we're the ones who got off easy. Those who can, do; those who can't, and are lucky enough, write down what everyone else is doing.

The woman looks up from the screen. “Everything would seem to be fine with your father's account. It's active and up to date.”

“Okay. Then why isn't his nursing home getting their money?”

“Give me another moment, please.” Her fingers fly at the keyboard once again and she takes her moment and maybe one more, before, “The cheques from the various factories you spoke of were directly deposited into your father's account at one time, but at the request of your father's legal overseer, they're now mailed to your father directly at his current address, specifically”—The woman consults her file—“Thames View Gardens.”

“Hold on—my father's what?”

This time the woman illustrates she's equally adept at flipping pages as she is at clacking keys. “It seems that your father's brother, a Mr. Donald Gordon Samson—I assume this is the Uncle Donny you spoke of earlier?” I nod. “Was given power of attorney by your father over his affairs before your father became a resident of Thames View Gardens.”

“Okay. Right. And?” I didn't know Dad gave him power of attorney—I barely know what power of attorney is—but since Uncle Donny was handling the majority of what went on when I wasn't here, it makes sense. I guess.

“I'm not sure what else you'd like me to tell you.”

“How about why my father is being threatened with eviction from his nursing home?”

“I'm sure I have no idea. That would come under your uncle's province as legally appointed overseer of your father's affairs.”

It sounds so simple coming from her mouth—right up until it leaves my ears and enters my brain, when it makes absolutely no sense. “But my dad's cheques—there's more than enough there to cover his room and board and everything else he needs at Thames View.”

I can see that the woman is consciously pausing before saying what she next has to say. This, I can tell, will not be the pause that refreshes.

“Did your father ever discuss with you the rights and responsibilities that come with someone having power of attorney over someone else's affairs?”

“I didn't even know my uncle had power of attorney until you just told me.”

“I see.” The woman lowers her eyes to her keyboard.

“So what are you saying? That my uncle has been cashing my father's cheques and keeping them for himself?”

“I'm sure I didn't say any such thing.”

“But that's what you're saying.”

“No—again, I didn't say anything of the sort. What I said was that you should perhaps speak to your uncle about your father's financial affairs.”

“Oh, I plan to, believe me.”

“Good.”

“Yeah, good.”

The woman escorts me to the front of the bank. I'd love to have a reason to be furious at either her or the bank or both, someone or something I could self-righteously scream at right here, right now, but when she stops walking and offers her hand and says, “I wish I could have been of more help,” goddamnit—I think she actually means it.

 

* * *

 

By the time I find my feet
in Tecumseh Park, I'm calmer, although it's not the thinking I do on the walk over that does the semi-soothing, it's the view of the winter-wrapped trees and the snow-dusted river and the walk to the park itself, exercise being the human body's built-in anxiety exhaust system.

I used to take the bus to the depot downtown and then walk through the park to CCI. John McGregor was the closest high school to home, but Chatham Collegiate Institute had the best football team. And if by grade eight it was apparent even to me that I wasn't NHL material after all, maybe football was my way to sports celebrity salvation. Because if at first you don't succeed, try, try again—even though everybody knows you're probably going to fail anyway. Which I did—was a starting linebacker by grade ten, but never big or fast or nasty enough to be anything more than a good high-school player—but which I didn't, either, CCI turning out to be not only a football powerhouse but, incidentally, the city's only academically elite secondary school. Not the reason I went there, but the reason I ended up being glad that I did. Mum had very clear career goals for me—to work in the air-conditioned front office of a factory like Siemens and not down on the dirty assembly line like my dad—and education, of course, had a role to play. Just not
too
much education. Too much learning, after all, being dangerous, like too many hotdogs on your birthday; was suspicious, like too much time spent alone in your bedroom. CCI made it okay to be smart. And now, apparently, it wasn't going to be there for much longer to make it okay for anyone else.

The school parking lot is full. When I went here, only the teachers and maybe half a dozen lucky students, with rich parents, parked their Tauruses and Cordobas and Trans Ams in the gravel lot. Which is a paved lot now, and where there's a shiny new black BMW parked near the school's east-side door that seems familiar, although that doesn't make any sense. Until its owner sees me staring at her car.

“I use The Club. You'd never get away with it.” Rachel Turnbal has her car keys in one hand and an empty white coffee mug dangling from a pair of ring-less fingers in the other, a bulging bag—not a purse—hanging over her shoulder.

“I was … I was walking and I ended up here.” Which isn't as pathetic as it sounds. Probably.

“Uh huh.” Rachel unlocks the driver side door and gets in, immediately starts the car. The passenger-side window slides down just enough for me to hear, “Now that you're here, are you staying or are you going?”

I get in.

“You don't teach
here
, do you?”

“Public school. Four, five, and six.” We blast out of the parking lot and I wait for the sound of spitting gravel that never arrives. “Would it be so surprising if I did?”

“No.” Yes. Rachel was a CCI anomaly—offspring of parents with money who was neither beautiful nor brainy. Until now, apparently.

“Where to today?”

“Home, I suppose.”

“You mean your parents' house?”

“Right. My parents' house.”

The surrounding houses and the Chatham Cultural Centre and the lone variety store where we used to shoplift during lunch period: nothing has changed. Unlike at home—real home, Toronto—where sometimes you'll be in a part of the city you haven't visited for only a few months and an entire building will have vanished, the steel skeleton of another one already spearing the sky.

“And that would be where, exactly?”

“Pardon?”

“Where do you want me to take you—where exactly do your parents live?”

“Right. Sorry.” Particularly when drunk-slumped in the backseat of a cab, everyone is secretly disappointed that the driver needs directions. How pleasant to believe that it's someone else's job for a change to know where you're supposed to be going.

“Do you know where Tecumseh High School was? It's a new subdivision near there.”

“Buttercup Village?” Rachel registers my surprise. “I teach at Tecumseh Public School.”

“Is that what the high school is now?” Rachel spares me a nod while concentrating on executing a perilous pass of an idling garbage truck.

“I don't know why,” I say, “but I thought it was a daycare centre.”

“Don't feel bad,” Rachel says, garbage truck behind us and the Beemer back up to speed. “Sometimes that's what it feels like to me too. And I work there.”

Rachel always was witty. Back in high school, though, I was too young to know that the funnier a person is, the more intelligent they're likely to be. Novels, human beings, films: it's easy to forget that
cosmic
is just
comic
with a single extra letter. F
ê
ted appearances to the phony contrary, a solemn book is a shallow book. Ditto pompous people and pretentious movies. Tragedy without comedy is like a brain without a heart.

“So you must have been leaving school the time before, when you picked me up last time.”

“What's wrong? Don't you believe in fate?”

Instead of squirming, I smile, a squirmy smile; Rachel laughs.

“Don't worry,” she says. “I don't either.” And just to emphasize her point—either that, or to contradict it—she pats my thigh a couple of quick times.

Both hands back on the steering wheel, “I heard about your wife,” Rachel says. “I can't imagine what that must have felt like. What it feels like.”

I look out the window. Duplex after duplex so similar in size, shape, and colour, if there weren't black metal numbers hanging over the front doors, their occupants likely wouldn't be able to tell which one was theirs. “Thanks,” I say.

“For what?”

“For not saying you're sorry.”

Everyone says they're sorry—sorry to hear it, sorry for your loss, sorry for you. The griever can't use
sorry
. And to say that you're sorry says that you know what their hurt feels like, thereby making that hurt seem just a little a bit less theirs. The only thing the griever gets in return for his pain is the privilege of it being his pain and no one else's. It hurts—it burns—but it's his.

Rachel doesn't reply—the perfect reply—and we're turning in at the gates of Buttercup Village. I feel like if I just sit here, just let her keep driving, she'll pull right up into my parents' driveway without another word from me. Because I don't want to find out I'm wrong, “It's right here, near the little park at the end, number two.”

Buttercup Village wasn't built for high-powered automobiles operated by exceptionally self-assured drivers with an inclination toward going much, much too fast, and I like the idea of every set of curtains and blinds along Dahlia Avenue blowing in the reverberating breeze in spite of every frozen-shut window, every irate home owner punching in the last desperate digit of 911.

“Okay, good to see you—again—and take care of yourself, okay?” No awkward goodbye, no pretend promise to stay in touch, no final farewell pat on the thigh. Excellent. Just the way I want it: easy and honest. Excellent. Not even one friendly tap. Not one.

I'm on the front step when I turn around at the roar coming down the street—Rachel, in reverse, travelling just as fast backward as when she left.

“There's a meeting tomorrow night at CCI about the closing. It's going to be pretty important. From seven until about nine. Some of us usually go for a drink afterward. You should come.”

And then she's gone again.

 

* * *

 

I call Uncle Donny without
telling him what I know and decide to wait for him on the front porch. In part, because I don't want to waste any time interrogating him; in part, because the freezing breeze might help cool off my baking brain. Just then a fat man in a white snowsuit and black wrap-around sunglasses too small for his flabby, wind-burnt face zips by the house, on a tiny, child-sized motorbike, the screech of the bike's buzz saw motor polluting the air almost as much as the clouds of smoke trailing behind. He looks like a circus midget who's lost his costume and make-up privileges and turned to steroids and corndogs in consolation. I almost don't believe he was there until, once around the block, he passes me again, joylessly staring straight ahead down the empty street.