I think of songs, of men in prison longing for motion, envious of the rumbling of trains, the inescapable sun above the road crew and the passing cars, the staring children or the naked shoulders of girls. The man said he wanted out because he had a baby coming, as did my father, whom he’d turned to because he knew him to be reliable. They both had women waiting.
“I let him off,” my father told me.
Hearing him, I had the impression that he was bothered by his life since, that the family he’d wanted had failed him. But the banks and jewelry stores were easier for him. He’d always been that boy afraid of wintering at home.
“Maybe I could have gone back to Quebec,” he said, “if things had turned out differently with your mother. I could have shown them my family and business. They’d have understood that. But even then, it was complicated …”
✴
AFTER MY MOTHER left, he’d stayed in bed for weeks, hardly eating. He got up only to use the bathroom or drink water or continue the calls he made to her or her parents. In a drawer, he found the address of a psychic she’d seen, a woman who’d told her that Vancouver would be destroyed in an earthquake. He made an appointment, wanting his own prophecy. The woman said she couldn’t talk about my mother, but told him that his middle child would be the first to return. It wouldn’t be soon. That was all she could say.
When he finally drove downtown, his hands shook, nausea grabbing at his throat as he turned with the traffic. He side-swiped two parked cars but didn’t stop. His store was unlocked and abandoned. He’d eaten a carton of fries, but he threw them up when he opened the door to the melting ice and rotting fish, the bluebottle flies flecking the display windows. The power had been shut off, and a reddish, jellylike fluid seeped from beneath the door to the walk-in freezer. He stayed only long enough to see that no money was in the register. A wino’s rusty shopping cart had been parked in the back room. Letters from creditors had piled on the floor. An eviction notice was posted on the door.
He sat in the minivan he’d bought a few months before, new on the market then—perfect for deliveries, he’d told everyone. His leather briefcase lay on the passenger seat and again he had a vision of filling it with fish. He’d take it to the bank and buy a safe-deposit box and put the fish inside.
Back home, the phone rang constantly. He had too many creditors and no money for taxes. He packed up a few of his possessions and stored them at a friend’s house. Then he went home and got some gasoline, a rope, and a knife. He poured the gasoline on his head, made a small cut at his throat, and managed to tie himself up. He struggled free and called the police. When they got there, he told them that men had come to his house, bound his hands, put a knife to his throat, dumped gasoline on him, and threatened to set him on fire. He’d confessed to where he kept his stash of money, and they’d taken everything. The police filed the report of stolen earnings, which he sent in the next day with his tax papers.
Then he loaded a backpack with food, a can opener, and a bottle of whiskey. His creditors would be after him, and he knew that everything would be repossessed. He hitchhiked until he was dropped off at an entrance ramp of the TransCanada Highway. The moon was rising, and it was the hour when he’d normally return home to the comfort he’d struggled against. He wasn’t far from a place he recalled, where the wide median was heavily forested, and where, just beyond the nearest exit, there was a convenience store. He waited until no headlights were in sight and crossed the pavement. The median was two hundred feet of forest. He pitched his tent in a deep, comfortable gully out of the wind. Even the sound of traffic seemed remote. He had a good sleeping bag. A little snow had fallen, preferable to the damp.
“No one expects you to disappear on the median of one of the world’s longest highways,” he told me over the phone. “Your creditors will think you’ve changed provinces or gone across the border.”
He said that when he was in the city, every now and then he still ran across men who were amazed to see him. “We thought you were dead,” they’d say. “You just disappeared.”
And that night, unable to sleep, he did consider dying. He wished he could see his mother one last time and apologize for decades of absence and the grandchildren she didn’t know existed. He lay with the bottle of whiskey as snow began to fall again, and his breath condensed into beads of moisture that speckled the canvas roof and froze.
But this wouldn’t be an ending. He’d dreamed that a family and business would put his old life behind him, though my mother still tells me that what made him who he was couldn’t change—too strong or too broken, strong in the way that injuries become strengths through endurance, that fractures mend hard within the bone.
I imagine his tent pitched in the evergreens, in that wide descent of stony earth, an echoing culvert below. I’ve traveled enough to know the solitary emotions of highway nights, but I can’t imagine that loneliness and rage. As he lay there, tremors passed through the earth, semis carrying raw tonnage from the interior along the highway that cut through the continent’s vast wilderness, from Vancouver to Quebec, connecting the lives he’d abandoned.
“I was thinking about my mother,” he told me. “I loved
