Requiem

rest. When I woke, it was to find myself at the river’s edge. Again, Lena was there, her body curled into mine.

Let it go, I tell myself. Let her go. I release the curtain and make my way downstairs in bare feet. Open the door for Basil, who streaks past in a grizzled mass of coiled energy and, just as coiled, returns. For a dog who is ten years old, he has surprising vigour. I pour pellets into his dish and turn away while he gallops through his food. The pellets resemble swollen cigarette butts stripped of their papers, an image I can do without so early in the morning.

A thin light has begun to filter down over the street. Next door, in the backyard of my elderly neighbour, Miss Carrie, a chaotic tangle of gooseberry bushes has emerged from under cover of melting snow. The snowbanks have shrunk to grass level now, but it’s a stretch to believe that bulbs are pushing up under that layer of slush. Years ago, Lena planted crocuses in our own backyard and, every spring, delicate purples and yellows defy the weight of winter and reappear like tendrils of hope.

Basil nudges my leg, my cue to pour water into his bowl. I wonder when to tell him we’re going on a trip. If I say the word, or even spell it aloud, as Lena and Greg and I used to do—though he quickly caught on—he’ll begin to run in tight, frantic circles until it’s time for me to say: Get in the car, Basil. From the way I’m being watched, I suspect he already knows. He’s tensed and ready, waiting for the words.

Despite his canine intuition, I make an effort to behave as if this is a morning like any other. I leave him in the kitchen and go back upstairs to dress, shave, pack a duffle bag. Shirts, socks, underwear, rough clothes for hiking that I can throw into a machine at a laundromat along the way—but only when necessary.

I add a couple of extra razors to my shaving kit and go to my studio, same side of the house as the bedroom. The blinds are never closed here. Clouds are tilted on their edges out there, a fleet of sails tucked to one another, news gusting from afar. With daylight lowering into the cold glint of city, I can see the Ottawa River more clearly now, a winding strip of darkness that defines the borders of two provinces. The Peace Tower erupts to the left. Old and dun, it lauds the sky without assumption, while the seats of power, the offices of Parliament, reside on either side. Not a scene I relish when I think of how the power was used in 1942. I focus, instead, on the smudges of pewter that are trees and bushes along the edge of the river as it disappears into an outline of hills behind.

I look down at my work table, knowing I’ve left the most important part of packing to the end. Every journey begins the same way. With reluctance, holding part of the self in abeyance, a distancing until I’m ready. I’m caught by this feeling, no matter what the destination. It’s a suspension of the want, the real work, the getting serious, the facing up. But facing up also means admitting the dark places that are only too ready to seep from the shadows. It occurs to me that I’m not unlike Basil, turning circles inside the front door as soon as he imagines a hand reaching for a jacket.

I stand, hands extended over the surface, ready to choose. Floor lamp to one side, small easel before me, supplies laid out as if I’d been painting only yesterday. Two plastic containers, water in one. Striped socks, a contrast of cobalt and dusky blue, slit lengthwise and made into rags that hang from hooks at the side of the table. A bar of Sunlight soap, worn flat in an old sardine tin. Brushes of every size laid out side by side; a dozen stubby bottles of acrylics in colours I’ve blended myself.

The truth is, I haven’t been in this room for weeks. The truth is, I haven’t cared about this room or the paintings in it. My heart lurches as if my thoughts have just created a zone called danger.

Across the room, an abandoned abstract leans into the larger of my two easels. From here, the edges are dark and menacing. Tentacles grope along the lower half, trying to slither into position. At the top left, oranges and yellows spill from what could be a split gourd, a generous, big-hearted offering. I feel a jolt of something stirring, some earlier sense-image. I’m struck by the balance of the whole. But just as quickly, the glimmer of satisfaction is gone. A broad, pumpkin-coloured sweep wants a push to the centre; it wants … or maybe it’s all right as it is and should be left alone.

When did I have the desire of those oranges and yellows inside me? I try to recover the feeling I had when I began to work on the canvas. Because here’s the proof that I was making an effort, even if it turned out to be an aborted thrust. Stab and pull back, stab and pull back.

Anger is not so easy to disguise to the self.

My sister, Kay, would have something to say about that—if given the opening. She fills the silent spaces, has a name, a theory, for everything. As a child, she was always a leader. But she’s more authoritative now, her ambition to the fore. It’s partly her job, what she deals with every day in her work as a counsellor. She has to define problems, probe for solutions, solve problems. Sometimes I picture a sleep-deprived student facing her across a wide desk, fumbling, looking down at his lap, inventing answers he thinks she would like to hear.

And what about Greg? Has he been seeing a counsellor at his own university? He wouldn’t tell me one way or another. Not that I would ask. I don’t push my way into his territory unless invited.

At the beginning, after Lena’s death, after the funeral in November, he phoned home every few days. His grief was raw and undisguised, the calls painfully brief. They are less frequent now—more like every few weeks.

“Dad? Are you working yet? Are you okay?”

I wasn’t able to help him and didn’t know how anyway. Greg has been a worrier, a Gramps, from the day he was born. Remembering the waver in his voice during one of those calls makes me think of another episode from his childhood. He hadn’t yet started school and I was away on assignment, doing illustrations for a natural history magazine that paid extremely well. I was staying at a motel in Alberta’s Badlands and had been gone almost two weeks when I received a letter from Lena. In those days, we wrote when either of us was away. Or sent cards.

You’ve been missed from the moment you boarded the plane. All the way back from the airport Greg stared glumly out the side window of the car. He said, “It isn’t funny, you know. It isn’t one bit funny when the family is split up like this.” When we returned to the house, he spread his palms—truly indignant—and said, accusing ME, as if I were the one responsible, “Now there are only two.”

And how, Lena continued, am I supposed to handle that?

A picture from Greg was enclosed, three large crayoned stick figures holding hands. It was labelled FAMBLY. A multicoloured rainbow arced across the upper right corner. At the bottom left were a stick-figure dinosaur and a hoodoo, both tiny, as if to let me know that the work I was doing was small, in comparison to FAMBLY.

Well, we are two again, but a different two, and Greg and I are stumbling along, but in separate parts of the country.

I look around my workroom and wish for what I cannot have. A time warp, a few moments when the three of us are living under one roof again. A light left on in the hall for the last person to come in from the dark. A meal of heated leftovers, nothing fancy. A note from Lena on the fridge door telling me she has taken Greg to his swimming lesson. The music of Benny Goodman floating out from the living room, announcing that Lena is home from work. Our bodies touching, by intent, as we brush past each other in the doorway.

A sharp bark from Basil at the foot of the stairs gets me moving again, and I begin to slide items into a shoulder pack from shelves above the table. A bound sketch pad, India ink, bamboo stylus that I probably won’t use but will bring anyway. A wooden box with a hinged lid that Greg unearthed at a flea market in Halifax two years ago and gave me for Christmas. A faded list, pasted inside the lid, shows that the box was once used to store medical slides. In thin lines of penmanship, the list reads: Blood, Cardiac muscle, Trachea, Tonsil, Tooth. I’ve left the list in place because I like the idea of objects in their original state. And I use the box now to hold charcoal, graphite pencils, jackknife for sharpening, soft eraser, quills. I take these on the road with me every time I travel. When Greg came home during Christmas break that year, he packed the box inside a carry-on suitcase he’d built from cardboard. There had been snowstorms on the East Coast and these had caused airport confusions, cancellations, rebookings, a bleary-eyed son arriving hours late. A son who was proud of his homemade suitcase and had Lena and me laughing the moment we picked him up and took a look at his luggage.

I stuff more bits and pieces into the side pockets of my pack. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll need, but I’ll figure this out along the way. More slit socks for rags, a capped container for water. Some of my river drawings are