Up and Down (21 page)

The image of Landon in my head dissolved and was replaced by a vision of the unemployment office. I was sitting on a frayed
blanket on the sidewalk out front, selling pencils … in the rain.

The speaker phone went dead, and I followed suit.

My two colleagues seemed to have recovered from their strokes. Amanda started sputtering and looked just about ready to detonate when Diane put her hand on Amanda’s arm. Fortunately, Diane had left that day’s wacky glasses in her office. I’m not sure I could have handled them right then.

“David, I’m surprised at how you handled this,” Diane started in a very measured tone. “Why didn’t you come to us beforehand? We could have worked through this and avoided all this unpleasantness.”

She was very calm. Amanda was not.

“You just screwed us!” she shouted. “We are royally screwed. Crawford thinks we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. We’re screwed. Screwed! Thanks so much!”

Diane touched Amanda’s arm again to quell the outburst. They both waited for me.

“I’m so sorry, it wasn’t supposed to unfold like that,” I explained. “Crawford called in early, just as I was about to tell you. I swear I was just about to tell you.”

“David, telling us thirty seconds before the big teleconference is only marginally better than shocking us on the call as you just did,” Diane replied. “Why didn’t you tell us over the weekend when you got back? Why didn’t you fire us both an email from the Vancouver airport so we could have worked on this together?”

“I don’t know. I was so conflicted. I knew she was a nonstarter
as the winner but her story is so compelling, and she is so compelling that I just couldn’t seem to give up the slim chance that I might be able to convince the team to let her go.”

“David, she’s seventy-fucking-one!” Amanda shouted.

I sat there looking down at the table. Clearly I’d misjudged the situation.

“You weren’t there in her cabin for two days or you’d understand. Before you discard the idea once and for all, will you just please consider what we’re giving up here. Seriously, think about this,” I implored. “This is all about driving media coverage and getting the public swept up again in the space program. So put yourselves in the shoes of the average reporter and the average Canadian. What’s going to be more effective? What is going to make it easier for us to achieve our goals? We could find the kind of citizen astronaut Crawford Blake is looking for, young, male, good-looking, carrying a hockey stick in one hand and a hatchet in the other, apparently saying ‘about’ differently from Americans, and looking like every other astronaut who’s blasted into orbit over the last half-century. Quite frankly, when I look out at my own country in the second decade of the new millennium, I don’t see too many Canadians like that any more.

“On the other hand, we could send Landon Percival up to the space station. A pilot. A doctor. A woman who lives alone on the shore of the most beautiful mountain lake you’ve ever seen. A passionate space junkie who was rejected nearly thirty years ago from our first astronaut training program because she was too
old. An amateur engineer who designed and built a friggin’ human centrifuge so she could train herself to withstand the G-forces of a ride in a rocket. A Canadian who for forty years has been searching for her father who disappeared on a bush flight without a trace in the wilds of northern B.C. in 1970. A winner who represents Canadian seniors – the largest and fastest-growing demographic in the country. Now you tell me which astronaut is more likely to captivate a nation.”

I could see their wheels turning and hoped they weren’t just spinning. It looked as if Diane was going to say something so I put my hand up to hold the floor for a minute or two more.

“We are sitting on an extraordinary story here. It’s a distinctly Canadian story about the land, heartbreak, mystery, ingenuity, quiet perseverance, courage, and redemption. Up against Landon Percival and her amazing journey in life, Eugene Crank or whatever his name is, will pale to transparency. He will just disappear. Frankly, Captain America would have trouble capturing the public’s attention with Landon on board. Consider what we have here. It’s pure gold. It’s a one-in-a-million story, and we’re going to turn our back on it because she’s seventy-one, not thirty-one? It’s just not right.”

Again, Diane opened her mouth to say something. Amanda looked deep in thought, which was a step up from deep in rage where she’d been a few minutes earlier.

Again, I raised my hand for the final push.

“Almost done,” I explained. “Diane, on my first day here, you
told me to tell the truth and do the right thing. Well, I think our client,
NASA
– not Crawford Blake, but
NASA
– deserves the advice they need to hear, not the advice they may wish to hear, or the advice Crawford wants them to hear. Landon Percival won the contest. She’s the legitimate winner. And when Canadians hear her story, their eyes will be glued to their televisions and computer screens from liftoff to landing. And through it all, they will be proud to be Canadian. Besides, I don’t think Emily Hatch will even let us pick another winner. If she catches even the faintest whiff of impropriety, she’ll shut us down, fast.”

Okay, I was done. There was nothing more to say. In fact, I’d probably overdone it but I figured if I was going down, I wanted a fire and an explosion when I hit the ground.

Neither Diane nor Amanda spoke. Diane was nodding her head almost imperceptibly. Amanda was looking at some point well beyond the walls of the boardroom.

My BlackBerry sitting on the table buzzed with a text. On instinct, my eyes went to the screen. It was from Lauren.

I grabbed my
BB
.

“I’m really sorry but I’ve got a bit of a family emergency. I really have to go now. It’s my mother. I really have to go. Sorry …”

I was out the door before either of them could say a word.

Her room was dim when I arrived. A few candles burned and one small lamp gave the scene a warm, even comforting, feel. Lauren was seated on the bed holding Mom’s hand. She’d been crying, and Mom looked far away. This was different. Lauren held out her other hand towards me when I entered. I took it and sat in the chair pulled up tight to the side of the bed.

“Mom, he’s here now. David is here,” Lauren said quietly, leaning in close to Mom.

With what looked like a titanic struggle, her eyelids vibrated, then fluttered open. Her eyes were alive and she managed a faint and fleeting smile.

“I’m here, Mom. I’m here. I’m sorry, I’ve been out of town.” I felt terrible for not coming over the previous day, but I had still been jet-lagged from my trip to B.C., not to mention overwhelmed by the challenge Landon had dropped in my lap.

Her grip on my hand was light, as if holding a baby bird. She looked at Lauren as tears gathered in her eyes.

“Thank you,” Mom managed, but just barely.

“Mom, don’t talk,” Lauren said, not quite cloaking the alarm in her voice. “We’re both here.”

Mom kept looking at her and managed two more words.

“Be kind.”

Hearing Mom utter those special words that she and Lauren had shared for so many years pushed me over the edge. It actually felt good not to try to hold it in any longer. Then Mom looked at me and I knew what was coming. She opened her mouth but
seemed not to have the breath to push out the words, even in a whisper. She let go of my hand, moved her index finger with care to her temple while staring at me, then dropped her hand to her heart, signing our own special phrase. I took her hand again.

“I will, Mom. I promise.”

She almost looked relieved. She closed her eyes and lay very still.

Lauren and I sat with her, still holding hands, for the next two hours as her breathing became ever more shallow. At the end, there were long stretches of silence between very short breaths. And then, there were no more breaths at all. They just stopped. I took my sister in my arms and held her, rocking slightly as she cried, but not for too long. We’d both known the path Mom was on, we just were never quite sure how much farther she had to go. Now we knew.

I led Lauren downstairs to the kitchen and poured her a glass of Shiraz – a big glass. I called the funeral home. I felt calm and a little detached, and wondered if the emotion of it all would come crashing down on me in the coming days. Perhaps, but I didn’t think so. I knew and accepted what had just happened. It was terribly sad, but there seemed to be no denial in me.

Two young women from the funeral home arrived about forty-five minutes later with an elderly doctor in tow to certify the obvious. They worked quietly, quickly, and with great reverence for the occasion. Lauren and I stayed in the kitchen. I just didn’t want to see them carry her to the discreet grey station wagon
parked in the driveway. I wanted my final memory of Mom to be of the three of us upstairs. Lauren agreed.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” the more senior woman from the funeral home said in the front hall half an hour later. The doctor had, apparently, already departed. “We’re finished now and will leave you. If there’s anything we can do to make this easier, please just let us know. Foster Davidson is expecting your call to arrange a planning meeting for your mother’s service and the final arrangements. Here is his card, and this is your copy of the death certificate.”

She pressed the business card and piece of paper into my hand.

“Thank you,” I said. “We very much appreciate how quickly and efficiently you’ve handled this. I’ll call Foster tomorrow.”

I found Lauren upstairs changing the sheets on Mom’s bed and tidying up. There was still a bookmarked paperback on the bedside table that Mom had been reading earlier in the week in those few remaining intervals of lucidity. The final decline had been swift and mercifully free of pain. With this wretched disease, there’s not much to give thanks for, but a quick and painless end counts.

By the time we were alone in the house, it was early evening. We ordered Chinese food and made phone calls to family members while we waited for our order to be delivered. Everyone said the right things on the calls. There would be no funeral. Mom didn’t want one. She would be cremated according to her wishes, with her ashes to be scattered at the family cottage on Georgian
Bay. We’d have the visitation at the funeral home Wednesday evening and Lauren and I would head up north on Thursday.

It was so strange opening the door to receive our Chinese food delivery and make small talk with the young driver as if everything were normal. It was an incredibly powerful and significant moment in our lives, but just another delivery for him. I was shocked to discover that I was ravenous. Lauren dug in as if she hadn’t eaten in days. Perhaps she hadn’t. We finished the calls to family and then wrote and submitted the obituary to the
Globe and Mail
and
Toronto Star
. It occurred to me that all of these logistical demands were in fact very helpful in keeping us going. There were responsibilities to fulfil, jobs to do, people to call, arrangements to make. It’s all part of the therapy.

Lauren and I collapsed on the couch at about 10:00 p.m. and ordered up a movie. It was a forgettable buddy cop comedy that wasn’t particularly funny. Yet we laughed hysterically at the lame one-liners, over-acted set pieces, and contrived pratfalls. It was just what we seemed to need.

I slept in the guest bedroom, with Lauren in her room next door. Neither she nor I wanted to be on our own that night. Just before I crawled between the sheets, I emailed Diane and Amanda to explain my situation. I told them I expected to be out of commission until the following Monday. I noted that Emily Hatch was on vacation this week anyway, making the drawing of another contest winner difficult. I suggested we hold off until Emily returned to ensure the integrity of the second
draw. I wanted to buy some time. I didn’t even bother looking at any emails that night. I turned off my BlackBerry, turned off my bedside lamp, and almost immediately fell into a deep and dreamless sleep closely approximating a coma.

At 2:00 the next afternoon, Lauren and I were in the basement of the funeral home seated at a small board table in the middle of what the sign above the door indicated was The Showroom. Until then, I really had no idea funeral homes had showrooms, but they do. Luxurious and very comfortable-looking caskets were angled artfully from the walls with descriptive feature sheets displayed in Plexiglas stands next to each. It was not unlike looking at expensive cars at the Toronto International Auto Show, but “plush interior” had a slightly different connotation in the funeral home setting.

A very helpful and sensitive Foster Davidson, dressed in a dark grey pinstriped suit, met us in the showroom. Take the classic image of a funeral director, tall, angular, sombre, morose, then amp the stereotype to well beyond caricature, and you’ve got Foster Davidson. All that was missing were black tails and a very tall stovepipe hat. We were there to make the
“final arrangements” and tie down the details for the visitation the next day. Despite Foster’s informative twenty-minute dissertation on the proud history, spiritual intimacy, and religious legitimacy of the open casket visitation, Mom had always thought it was creepy to have the body present, particularly with the lid propped open. So her wish was to be cremated right away, but to invite friends and family to pay their respects if they wanted to in one of the funeral home’s lovely reception rooms. She also did not want her ashes resting peacefully in some over-the-top rococo urn, positioned on an ornate plinth, surrounded by the bereaved in the middle of the visitation room. She thought that would be even stranger than the open casket, or what she used to refer to as the “convertible coffin with the top down.”