Gaetan tossed his now cold coffee into the snow where it left a deep brown stain and placed his mug on top of one of the higher snow drifts. He hoped he would be able to find it later, but just in case gave it a two-finger salute goodbye. “You’ve served me well.”
After digging his way into the shed, he collected the tools he needed—a large shovel, a trowel, a cultivator, two sheets of cardboard, and the garden hose—to build his sons’ birthday present.
The night before, he’d instructed Algoma to keep the children away from the backyard and the windows that faced it for the day, if she could. He looked at his watch. Eight o’clock. He heard a window rattle and looked up. The blind in the kitchen had been drawn. They were awake. He had to work faster.
Chilled, Gaetan worked all morning to rearrange the snow in the backyard. With his shovel, he moved small mountains of snow, leaving some areas with only a few inches of ground cover, while others were host to piles several feet deep. He moulded and edged the piles with the trowel, erasing his mistakes with the rusty prongs of the cultivator. By mid-afternoon, he had finished construction. He screwed in the garden hose and turned on the water to coat sections with a thin layer of ice.
After a dinner of deer roast and baked winter squash dripping with butter and brown sugar, and before the vanilla birthday cake with cream cheese icing was introduced, Gaetan turned to Ferd and Leo who were still shovelling forkfuls of food into their mouths. “Your present is outside. Put on your jackets, let’s go.”
The boys stood at the edge of the backyard, Algoma and Gaetan standing behind them. The boys’ eyes tried to adjust to the darkness. Leo desperately looked for the square silhouette of a present. “What did you get us? I can’t see it,” he said.
Ferd rubbed his mitts together. “I’m cold. Can you bring it inside?”
Algoma nudged Gaetan with her shoulder. “Turn on the light.”
He reached inside the door and flicked the switch. The backyard was instantly saturated in sparkling blue light. Before dinner, Gaetan had switched the outdoor white light bulbs for two blue ones he’d picked up the week before.
The boys gasped.
Algoma yelped. “I love it!”
Gaetan beamed, near ready to collapse from fatigue or lack of drink.
The entire backyard was washed in a celestial light that reflected and refracted off the layer of ice that covered every inch of the backyard. As their eyes readjusted to the bright lights, a small blue planet of snow and ice was revealed to them.
Ferd was the first to step forward into the glow, his red wool mitt coming to rest on the back of a snow chair. The entire backyard was sculpted into snow slides, forts, benches, and animals. An English garden made out of snow. And all of it covered in layers of ice. Leo followed his brother into the yard. Like a tightrope walker trying to keep his balance, he walked with both arms outstretched until he reached the bottom of the steps of the snow slide. He ascended the five stairs slowly and carefully and then launched himself headfirst down the smooth sheet of ice.
“I have cardboard sleds, too,” Gaetan said. He held up two flattened Jim Beam boxes, one in each hand, Leo’s name written in blue marker on the left one, Ferd’s on the right.
Long into the evening and well past their bedtime, the boys tramped and bellied across their hedge-bound ice floe like a pair of dark, bright-eyed seals. Their squeals and yelps, kicks and slips echoed off their father’s ice architecture. Their laughter and screams muffled only by the slow moving clouds drifting beneath the black sea of a December sky.
______________
2:01 p.m. -22°C. Wind N, strong.
Single pane windows rattling in their frames.
Ferd looked out the classroom window at the frozen playground. He daydreamed about showering, the spray of hot water and the clouds of steam. The classroom was cold and sitting next to the window made it even worse. The only time he felt truly warm in the winter months was in the shower, the steaming hot water insulating his body against the cold. But it was always over too quickly, his mother or father banging on the washroom door in an attempt to hurry him up, yelling that they weren’t millionaires, that he was emptying lakes, that there would be nothing left for anyone ever again.
Ferd had resolved that when he was older and richer he would build a shower stall that had two shower heads, one at either end of the bathtub. He would never be cold again. But until then, he would have to rotate in the tub like a chicken on a spit.
“Water is a common chemical substance that is essential for the survival of all things on earth,” the teacher said, not looking at any student in particular. Twenty-eight faces stared blankly back at her. None of them knew how someone so young could be so boring. Ms. Prevost pointed to a poster taped to the blackboard that showed the various states of water.
“Did you know that water has three states?” she asked. Every question she posed sounded like a sigh. She tapped on each state with her finger as she called them out: “Liquid, solid, gaseous.” She turned to the class. “Repeat after me.”
“Liquid. Solid. Gaseous,” they said in unison.
Only Ferd smiled. Finally, something useful, he thought. There was little he could do with division or history, but this, this was useful.
During recess, while the other students were playing life and death games of tether-ball and engaged in epic snowball fights, Ferd easily slipped past the recess monitor’s relaxed watch and ran across the street. He hopped the chain-link fence and landed behind the Save-a-Dime Laundromat. He took a deep breath, it smelled like summer, a warm mix of detergent and dryer sheets. After a quick search, he found what he was looking for. The dryer vent.
Ferd stood in front of the vent, pulled off his mitts, and put his hands directly into the warm steam. Beneath the vent was a half moon of asphalt that was barren of snow, the heat of several dozen loads a day kept the area summer warm year round. Ferd pulled off his backpack and pulled out a small notepad and a pen. He wrote quickly and folded the note four times. After rummaging through his pockets he found the penguin-shaped paperclip he’d stolen from his teacher’s desk. Using the paperclip, he attached the note to the inside of the cracked plastic of the vent cover and stood back. He dreamed of his words floating up into the atmosphere, dispersing into the air.
Water is essential for all life.
Leo was like a fish now, all silver scales and slick motion, moving with the currents over rock bed and submerged tree trunk. He had found the lowest possible place to hide, dive.
Maybe their father had gone looking for him.
Through the kitchen window, Algoma looked at the backyard. What snow was there was not handcrafted into a winter playground. Gaetan had found the energy for two boys, but not for one. She drew the blind and bent over the sink. Another wave of nausea bubbled up inside her. She clutched her stomach and vomited onto the unwashed breakfast dishes. Worry, she thought, did strange things to the body.
Finally alone in the house after having convinced her sisters that she needed to rest, it felt like her body was emptying itself. Glad for their presence, but even more grateful for the silence after they had left, she no longer had to spend her time trying to reassure them that she was fine. That Gaetan was coming home. The reason for all the mystery that would be explained once he walked through the door. She’d had to force Ferd to go to school in the morning. He had wanted to stay home with her again, to try to convince her to drive through the streets looking for Gaetan, but she’d refused him.
“What if someone at school has seen him, or knows something,” she’d said, dangling hope in front of him. He’d taken the bait.
Algoma put on her jacket and boots and went outside. She stood still and let the cold air seep into the cracks in her winter clothing, the openings at her wrists and neck. The cold felt good on her hot skin. She wanted to sit on her sliding swing, but the platform was snowed in, the rails frozen. Undeterred, she went into the shed and selected a tool.
Algoma knelt on the ground, and used her hands to dig away the snow and her pointed trowel to chip away at the ice. Soon, the swing was able to grind its way along the tracks. She put her trowel down and stepped onto the platform. The two benches were covered in a foot of snow, which she pushed off with her hands before sitting down. She shifted her body weight back and forth until the swing moved with her, the remaining chunks of ice crushed underneath.
Being on the swing was like sitting in a cradle, soothing to the point that she was close to falling asleep despite the cold. Her eyes fluttered, almost closing, as she allowed herself to drift off, to daydream of better times. However, in the middle of the yard, a slice of shine caught her eye. A small patch of ice in the snow that reflected the winter sun. She knew it was another note, this one pressed between a layer of snow and ice. She looked at the side of the house. The garden hose was out. At least Ferd had rolled it back up. She stood up and walked over to the note. Using the heel of her boot, she broke the ice and then tossed the shards away. At least she wouldn’t have to dry out this one.
With the note tucked securely in her coat pocket, Algoma went to work on the yard. She moulded the grainy snow into a pitiful interpretation of Gaetan’s crowning glory. It quickly became clear that her skills were lacking. Her snow stairs were built at a dangerous tilt. Her chair was little more than a crumbling heap with a flattened top. The fort had collapsed within minutes. Even her attempts to coat her creations in ice failed—the yard pockmarked with pools of water and abandoned garden tools.
Unlike Leo’s disappearance the year before, there were no sightings this time—real or imagined—of Gaetan. He was gone, yet when she returned to the house the few times she’d left in the past several days, she systematically checked each room for changes, things missing or moved. She could spend an hour looking at the toothbrush holder, trying to remember if the red toothbrush had been the one closest to the sink, or the blue.
Gaetan had taken Leo’s death hard. It was he who had taught his sons to be self-reliant, how to take care of themselves in and out of the woods, in all circumstances. In the months after the drowning, Gaetan had asked Ferd to repeat what he’d witnessed over and over again until the boy was brought to tears.
“Tell me again what happened. Slower this time.”
Gaetan had been looking for a hole in the story, something he could slip and knot his hope through. In every retelling of Ferd’s story, what was missing was why Leo would have followed the bear in the first place—an animal three times his size. “It’s not something rational, healthy people do,” he’d argued. The bear had obviously been ill. Maybe Leo had been ill, too. Something they had not seen muddying his blood and taking him away.
MARCH – APRIL
8:24 p.m. 11°C. Wind S, blustery.
Bottles lined up as carefully as soldiers.
Gaetan searched the unfamiliar bar for a bottle of Scapa, a drink he could never have served at Club Rebar even if someone had had the money to ask for it. He found the bottle and poured a dram of liquid over ice.
“Why don’t you tip that bottle forward a little further and I’ll tip you a little better,” said the man who sat across from Gaetan at the bar.
The man was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, but they were neatly pressed and looked expensive. Thick material, nothing frayed. Gaetan noted the thick, gold chain around the man’s wrinkled neck, the dented wedding ring, and how everyone who passed by nodded at him. He filled the glass three fingers deep. The man gave him an appreciative smile, took a sip, and slipped Gaetan a crisp twenty-dollar bill. This city and its people, the occasional random extravagances, didn’t make sense to Gaetan, but he accepted them more than he did most things he understood back home.
It was in between shift changes at the police headquarters across the street, which afforded Gaetan a break from an otherwise busy night. He leaned against the glossy mahogany bar and marvelled again at how he’d found this place—all dark wood and brass trimmings. An everyday pub with royal leanings.
Club Rebar offered only a selection of five domestic beers, two imported, and an embarrassment of low-end rum, vodka, whisky, gin, and crème de menthe (a local favourite). The Brass Ring was stocked with no fewer than a hundred bottles of fine spirits and liqueurs. None of the patrons—most of them police, retired police, office workers from the station, and security guards—were ever forced to choose from among fewer than a half dozen brands of their favourite drinks.
Although he’d worked at the bar for a while already, he still had trouble finding the right bottles during a rush. Old physical memory kicked in and he grabbed rum when he meant vodka.
Gaetan found the bar the day he’d arrived in Toronto. He’d left the bus station and walked through the city until he found himself standing in front of The Brass Ring. He walked in for a drink and by the time he reached the bottom of his glass, he’d been hired. The owner had been filling in for a bartender who’d called in sick for his shift for the last time.
“Fucking hungover is what he is,” the owner said, as he poured Gaetan his drink. Rum and coke, no ice. “That’ll be five-fifty.”
Gaetan said thank you and tipped the man generously with money he shouldn’t have spared and immediately regretted it.
“You’re from somewhere else, aren’t you?” the owner, Hal, asked. “I mean, you have an accent.”
“Quebec.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Bet it makes people feel like they’re somewhere else when they’re talking to you, hey? Like they’re in goddamn Paris, or something. Where’d you learn English? School?”
“My cousin used to live here,” Gaetan said. “I used to visit a couple times a year until she moved to Miami with her husband. He was from Scarborough.”
“Well, this ain’t no fucking Miami or Scarborough neither. It’s better. Middle of it all.”
The day after Gaetan’s first shift, he’d gone to a bookstore and bought a drink-making guide. Never in his former life had he been asked to make the strange cocktails and potions that customers at The Brass Ring asked for. These were people who’d been around the world and returned home with new palates and cravings for the drinks they’d had abroad, each of them trying to outdo the other in asking for something the bar “couldn’t possibly stock.” Gaetan liked it best when they just ordered a beer, even if it wasn’t domestic. Nevertheless, he’d spent a solid week studying the geography of the drinking world and sampled everything the bar had to offer, so he knew exactly what he was pouring, or so he said.
The man who’d ordered the Scotch had almost emptied his glass and was already eying the bottle.
Gaetan took the cue. “More?”
A slow, sleepy nod of approval. More people passed by, touching the man’s shoulders like he was a good luck charm. He didn’t even turn to look at them, only nodded into his glass. Gaetan poured two shots into the glass.
A large group walked through the double doors at the front of the bar. They were already drunk and one of the men was wearing a bridal veil over his baseball cap. The night was getting busy again. Gaetan was glad for the bar, the hard wood that separated him from everyone else, with the exception of the three other bartenders who moved fluidly around him, barely speaking until closing.
Gaetan had quickly learned the silent physical shorthand of working behind the bar. The bartenders saved their smiles, jokes, and flirting for the tipping customers. Where there had been empty booths only twenty minutes earlier, the bar was now standing room only. The waitresses busted through the kitchen doors with heaped plates of nachos, fries, and wings.
The people who came to The Brass Ring seemed to spare no expense. Gaetan wondered where all their money came from. No kids, probably. The drinks were overpriced and the food mediocre, even if there was a lot of it. The short-skirted service didn’t seem to hurt, either. The women, some hardly more than girls, were required to dress in black polo shirts and black-and-red kilts. Hal made sure he only ordered the uniforms in size small and hired his staff to match. The waitresses were a tough lot. Carrying trays loaded with drinks, they skillfully weaved through the inebriated ranks mostly managing to avoid the slaps on the ass with which some of the men tried to “tip” them.
Gaetan looked up from the pint of Guinness he was pouring. One of the girls, Aasha, was unsuccessfully trying to excuse herself from a booth.
“I’ll be right back with your beer,” she said, with a large fake smile, teeth as white as ceiling paint.
“I love you,” the sergeant slurred leaning close to her chest. He was only a half hour off duty and already drunk.
The waitress staggered back and held her tray in front of her like a shield. “Do you want something to eat maybe? Coffee?”
The man tried to playfully bat away her tray. “No, no, no. Just you and that beer I ordered.” He knocked his empty beer bottle over. “You wanna sit down with me?”
“How about some bread?”
The sergeant smiled and then his face crumpled, his eyes watering. He grabbed Aasha’s forearm. “Even when I’m an asshole, and I’m an asshole, you keep coming back to check on me and ask me what I need.”
Aasha tried to wrench her arm free and catch the attention of the doorman or one of the other waitresses.
“It just means so much to me. Thank you. I love you. I completely love you.”
With that profession, he shut his eyes and fell sideways out of the booth and onto the floor. Aasha screamed and dropped her tray on him. People turned around and laughed. Hal stomped across the floor, unceremoniously elbowing his way through the crowd. Luckily, the sergeant’s friends arrived at the booth before Hal did and scooped their fallen friend up by his arms.
“We’ll take him home. Sorry about that,” said the largest man in the group. “It’s not like we won’t need the same favour sooner or later.”
Another one of the friends handed Aasha four twenty-dollar bills. “Cool?”
Aasha nodded at the forty-eight-dollar tip. “Inconvenience fee,” the man said, and smiled. “Hey, do you know where his shoes are?”
She shook her head and watched the men drag their barefoot friend out of the bar.
As soon as they were outside, Gaetan watched Aasha reach under the booth and pull out the man’s boots, his socks still tucked inside. She looked around to see if anyone was looking and walked toward the kitchen and tossed his boots in the trash.
Algoma wouldn’t have let those boots go to waste, he thought. They’d have been plant holders by the end of the day.
He leaned against the cold glass of the beer fridge. Although he hadn’t left home that long ago, it already seemed like years. After Leo had died, the days seemed to repeat, varying little from one to the next. Even the weather became predicable. His grief did not lessen or change into something more manageable. He felt unleashed, while everyone and everything around him was an anchor.
Each day, he’d had to contend not only with his own loss, but with Algoma’s as well, and Ferd’s increasing flights from reality. And the notes. He’d read and reread them, looking for the message within the message, the date the madness would end, or how he could stop it, but the answer never came.
Unplanned, and in the middle of a shift at the bar, Gaetan had gone out for a smoke. Once finished, he tossed his butt into the snow and walked until he reached the highway. He only had to walk for ten minutes along the soft shoulder until someone picked him up and he was on his way. With each kilometre, he felt lighter, the distance between himself and everything else he knew growing greater by the minute. By the end of the week, he’d started working at The Brass Ring and living in one of the owner’s apartments. “Investment properties,” he called them. It had been like living in a mining town, most of his earnings went back to his boss for rent. But at least there had been no questions. Hal hadn’t cared about Gaetan’s life, only that he showed up for work. A perfect arrangement.
If asked, Gaetan would not have been able to explain why he’d left Le Pin, or if he would ever return. He felt calm and light now, completely unburdened, under a new sky. Everything had been left behind—Leo’s death, Ferd’s notes, his weather journal, his wife, his life. While he knew he would miss his family, his need to escape the eyes of the town had been stronger. At the twenty-four-hour grocery store on Chestnut Street, no one asked him with wide, pitying eyes how his wife was coping; they just bagged his groceries. When he went to have his hair cut, the barber didn’t slap his back and say, “I’m sorry, man,” for the sixth time in as many months. Back home, he’d not been able to escape the town’s memory of his loss, but here no one knew to ask. They passed him on the street like he didn’t matter, like he was not there at all. It was perfect.
Ferd could take care of himself. He had made sure of that early on. And Algoma would be okay, she would adapt, this much he knew. She’d fill his empty space, so that it was as if he’d never left. She would cut and restitch his memory into something new that she could use. While his new life did not feel like it was his own yet, it was something different and that was enough to allow him to sleep after a hard shift at work—and they were all hard shifts—something he hadn’t been able to do in a year.
Most of the regulars at The Brass knew Gaetan only as the quiet guy they liked, the one with the accent who poured any drink they asked for no matter how many they’d already had. He poured generously and they tipped him well. At Club Rebar, Gaetan had no longer known if the men were tipping for good service or out of pity.
Gaetan looked around the bar. None of the women looked like his wife, here they were hard and shiny, leather and platinum. Some were cops’ wives, and others wannabes. And a few, whom Gaetan could easily pick out, were on the force. He liked them best. They exuded purpose and precision, but could also throw drinks back like the rest of the guys, looking like little could faze them. Algoma, under her veil of scarves and used furs, always looked like she was on the verge of imploding, disappearing entirely under the weight of everything around her.
The media had been captivated by Leo’s death and the bear for weeks, focusing just as much airtime on the animal as they did the boy. Animal experts and hunting guides were interviewed. Long distance shots of school children crying made the local news. Everyone was an expert. Everyone knew someone who knew someone. Gaetan wondered if anyone had mourned the loss of the bear. He had not, but whenever he thought of Leo, he thought of the bear. The two were as entwined in his mind as Leo and Ferd had once been. Inseparable.
The night was a blur of drinks and exchanged cash until people in the bar started leaving, piling into the cabs outside. Gaetan looked at his watch. It was five to two. He could go home soon.
After a few drinks with the closing staff after the doors had been shut, Gaetan left the bar. Outside, the sky was already changing. He could see the light blue glow of morning bleeding into the black. He was tired. Cabs slowed down beside him as he walked home, but he didn’t look their way, so they drove off to the next person. He liked that about Toronto, the city was never entirely closed, the streets never completely empty.
Close to home, Gaetan passed a homeless man seated on the sidewalk. The man was older and had a cardboard sign resting in his lap that said “Just had open heart surgery.” A German shepherd slept to his right. Gaetan dropped whatever change he had into the man’s crumpled coffee cup and kept walking. The man looked like his father. The resemblance was so strong that he struggled not to think it was his father shored up and broken against the brick.
When Gaetan arrived at his apartment building, there were two young men in the elevator who were only partially successful in holding one another up. They were drunk and arguing about food.
“Nothing’s open this late and I’m starving,” the blond one whined. “We should’ve picked up something earlier.”
The other man starred at Gaetan, his eyelids fluttering, blue eyes rolling back: “Do you know if anything’s open around here? I mean for delivery?”
Gaetan shrugged his shoulders and looked at the floor and mumbled, “No.” Then he thought of that steak on a bun place on Yonge he liked, but didn’t say anything. He stared at the closed door. When the elevator arrived at his floor, he turned to wave at the men as a sort of apology for not being able to help them, but they were now deeply kissing, the food ordeal forgotten.
“Sizzlers,” Gaetan said quietly.
He put his apartment key into the lock, one of only three keys he had now, and opened the door. His place was clean and empty except for the usual kitchen appliances, an orange-and-brown floral print couch that one of the waitresses had given him and a futon bed he’d bought after sleeping on an air mattress for his first three weeks in the city. He planned to get a small TV next, something to have on in the background, but for now the balcony provided him with all his entertainment. He sat out there for hours after work when he knew he should be sleeping, sitting in his lawn chair until the sun peeked over top of the apartment buildings and the glass shone like mercury.