Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music (6 page)

“Yeah, sure,” Simon said. “Don’t worry about it.”

We were as young as that, once.

WHEN I WAS
sixteen, my mother moved our family to Toronto, and Cole, not keen on long distances, dumped me, thoroughly shattering my teenage heart. Simon grew his bowl cut out into a mane of long dark curls and, with the help of a daily ten-plus cups of coffee habit, lost his dimply baby fat. He started a band called CODA, which played a mix of Zeppelin, Stones, and Police tunes. Always well liked by a wide cross-section of the high school population—browners, jocks, stoners, metalheads, preppies, teachers—he befriended them all, and his popularity increased exponentially when he started playing live shows. In his previous hometown in rural Quebec, he had been picked on, bullied daily, and his new social status in Orangeville was a constant surprise and gift to him.

He started dating girls two, three, four years his senior, often calling me for relationship advice. Despite distance, his dating adventures, and mine, our friendship flourished. We talked on the phone almost daily, and every few weeks I would ride the bus to Orangeville, or he would come to Toronto. We liked to stride through the city streets framing shots for album covers and making up band names, album titles, silly songs. We kvetched about the fickleness of our respective love affairs and promised that if things hadn’t settled down by the time our hair was gray, we would marry. We sing-shouted the lyrics to the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four” to one another. I knew these particular Beatles lyrics because I’d had to sing them, memorized, for a grade 8 assembly. Simon knew the lyrics because... he knew lyrics. I hadn’t yet been able to name a song he couldn’t sing.

Simon was a good singer who, despite being a musical perfectionist, always valued intent and commitment over technique. There weren’t many people I would trust my enthusiastic but squawking singing voice with, but I trusted Simon. Despite my off-kilter notes, our voices together created an inexplicable sense of rightness, difficult to articulate beyond a blood-deep intuition of internal harmony or the effortless balancing of opposites: together we were risky and comforting, thrilling and safe. Long before our first kiss, Simon and I were singing in preparation for the long, sweet haul of our marriage.

WE DIDN’T WAIT
until we were sixty-four. When we were twenty-one, Simon tracked me down to a small clearing on the edge of a large forest in Halfmoon Bay, on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, where he and his acoustic guitar proceeded to seduce me—some might say unfairly—with song. Taj Mahal, J. J. Cale, Muddy Waters, Paul Simon... Simon’s knowledge of music was encyclopedic, and he could play almost anything he had ever heard. And in between singing the songs that other people had written, he played his own music, instrumental stories that skipped and strutted and cakewalked down a long, winding path, stories that were exploratory, curious, open-ended. He refused to commit them to the confines of any song form.

“What’s that?” I’d say. “It’s pretty.”

“It’s nothing.” This was his inevitable answer. “Nothing. Just an idea I’m working on.”

But it wasn’t nothing. When Simon sat on the porch steps outside my cramped kitchen and played, it was as if he was giving voice to some secret, urgent, inarticulate, tangled part of my soul. I was helpless against that kind of power.

We danced around each other for almost two weeks, each of us uncertain how to proceed. Then, one Friday night, we went to see a band play at a local pub. Out on the dance floor we swayed, a little closer, then a little closer, circling each other, and I realized what our problem was. A simple kiss would never do to break through the buffer of friendship we had built over the years. I leaned into his chest and bit his shoulder.

Rising the next morning, I took a moment to gaze at Simon’s sleepy form. We had woken together so often over the years, him on an air mattress at the end of my bed, or me on the couch in his parents’
TV
room, that I wondered what would be different this time. What had changed now that he was in my bed?

“Your legs are gorgeous,” I said, giving him an appraising look. “I never noticed before.”

On Simon’s twenty-first birthday, his mother, Lorna, called Halfmoon Bay to give him the news that he had been accepted to the music program at Concordia University in Montreal. It was the best birthday present. After high school, Simon had taken time off to play in a band and work. He had learned to play guitar by ear, never learning to read music, a liability he believed radically limited his chances of being admitted to an academic music program. So, in a burst of determination, he had devoted three months to cramming in two-plus years of Conservatory music theory in preparation for the entrance exam.

Simon’s occasional but mammoth-sized crises of school-related self-doubt baffled me. Quick-witted and able to make spontaneous connections between disparate bits of information that were intriguing and often hysterically funny, Simon was inventive and resourceful—ingenious. The way his mind worked delighted me. No one I knew came close to Simon’s intellectual precociousness. I wasn’t surprised that he had been accepted into his program of choice. A little heartsick that he might leave me behind when he returned to Quebec, yes, but not surprised.

We decided that I would drive Simon to Montreal in my new-old gold Ford van and that during the trip we would make some decisions about our relationship. As far as road trips went, this one was mostly a disaster: ill planned and underfunded. The alternator sparked out in Renton, Washington, and three days later the battery died. We blew a tire on a desert highway before landing in Salt Lake City, cash-strapped and stranded, while we waited for Simon’s parents to deposit some money in his bank account. With our last few dollars we bought a jar of instant coffee, a loaf of bread, some peanut butter, and a small bottle of bourbon, and we parked the van on a dead-end country road outside of town. It wasn’t until Simon unscrewed the lid on the Wild Turkey and the fiery whiskey-sting filled the air that the possibility of pregnancy occurred to me.

“No, thanks,” I said and waved the opened bottle away. A small print warning underneath the image of the bald-headed, ruddy turkey on the front warned
Alcohol consumption may harm a fetus,
and I knew then, suddenly, completely: I was going to have a baby.

I spent the rest of the trip calculating and recalculating dates. The summer had been hectic, and my memory was blurry. We had been careful but maybe not careful enough. It wasn’t until we crossed back into Canada at the Detroit–Windsor border that I found the nerve to tell Simon I needed to take a pregnancy test.

“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

We drove on for another fifteen minutes, silent.

“What will happen...,” I said finally. “What will happen if we have a baby?”

“If we have a baby,” Simon said without hesitation, “it will be our best friend. We’ll be fine.”

It was exactly the right thing to say. But after we returned to Canada, things—big life things—swiftly became much more complicated. While I went to my mom’s new place in Kitchener, Simon went on to Montreal and prepared to start his first year of university.

“You
say
we can figure this out together,” I complained on the phone during one of our epic long-distance talks, “but what you
do
is a different matter. You’re out partying and moving on with your life. I’m just sitting here... pregnant.”

I didn’t know what to do. I was young and lost with no idea of who I was, where I wanted to go, or what I wanted to do.

“I don’t know what to do,” Simon said.

“Well... neither do I.”

“I want to not know what to do together,” Simon said.

“So do I.”

And so the gold van took one last trip before she retired, delivering me from Kitchener to the neighborhood known as Notre-Dame-de-Grâce,
NDG
, in downtown Montreal.

On October 30, 1991, at the stroke of midnight, we read out loud handwritten vows and celebrated by eating avocado, crushed almonds, and red pepper in a garlicky dressing. The news of our pregnancy had not been well received by our family or friends—we were, according to the world at large, too young, too unformed, too irresponsible, too stupid, and too poor to have a baby, all of which we acknowledged was, to some degree, true—and there were no other people we wanted to invite. And so we set a third plate at the table for our midnight feast and invited the spirit world, an impromptu gesture meant to include every ghostly emanation, from Halloween spooks to our unborn child. There was no minister or justice of the peace, there were no flesh-and-blood witnesses, and I didn’t change my name, but none of that lessened the commitment we made to one another that night—young, stupid, and poor as we were—to entwine our lives and raise our child together.

On March 7, 1992, a month early, I went into labor. At the hospital, hooked to a fetal heart rate monitor, I was cramped and scared, unable to get up and move around, and the only source of distraction was watching the tiny blips of Eli’s heart rate. In the middle of the night, I realized that every time Simon entered the room and spoke, Eli’s heart would speed up, as if in anticipation of their upcoming meeting.

Twenty-four hours later I was rolled into a birthing room, the bloody world inside me rupturing. Then, the sound of church bells. They were ringing for Sunday service, and the air in the delivery room trembled with resonant song.

“Hello, Eli,” Simon said and held out our new best friend—milky white and wet, full of new breath—for me to see.

SIMON AND I
have traveled a great distance together since the day we met in history class. We moved from Ontario to British Columbia to Quebec and back to
BC
, to the place where we have made our home, in Halfmoon Bay, not far from the site of our original kiss. There have been times, the good times, when we have embraced the need for compromise and constant reinvention, and there have been times, the tougher times, when we have resisted, even fought against it. But, always, we made the decision to put in the work. There were, of course, tangible benefits for doing that kind of work over the years—greater stability, security, steady forward motion—but the real reward is not so easy to articulate, residing as it does in the wordless late-night blending of bodies that had, ultimately, less to do with sex and more with the synchronized switching of spoons that occurred even as we slept.

What, I often ask my writing students, are the Horses of your piece? It was a question asked of me by my writing teacher, Maureen Medved, at the University of British Columbia. The horses, she explained, pull the covered wagon. The pioneers get in their wagon and start their journey west. Everything changes—the landscape, the weather, the relationships in and out of the wagon. The horses alone remain the same. She tapped the thirty pages of my fatally flawed manuscript and said, I don’t see your Horses.

Some of my writing students understand the concept of Horses immediately. Others struggle with it. Do you mean theme, they want to know, or literary symbolism? No, I tell them, although they are connected. It’s less about where a story is going, I say, and more about how it gets there. What is it, I ask, that pulls us through?

I believe that a marriage, like a novel (or any successful work of art), requires Horses. Good, strong horses: proud, tall bays with long black manes, possessing speed and endurance. Horses strong enough to pull you both through the changing landscape of your life, the changing landscape of your body.

Our Horses? Eli, always Eli, our first and most important work. Then the compulsion to do, to make, to create things both useful and sustaining, a compulsion that Simon and I share and that has led us over the years to bake bread, build houses, write stories, and record
CD
s. And then the standby steeds in our stable: good food, good friends, good family. And music. There has always been music.

AT SIXTEEN, ELI
is tall, athletic, and strong. He shares his father’s wide green eyes and the extra-plump lower lip of his mouth, a feature common to many in the Paradis clan, but he is longer and leaner than Simon. It is hard to pinpoint when I started reaching up to hug him, but it is still a new enough sensation as to feel odd and not quite right.

A serious soccer player, Eli has been attending a soccer camp on Vancouver Island. When he arrives at Sassafras in the morning, he knows only that Simon was injured in an accident, and his face is stiff and strained with worry. He is too big. It would be better if I could pick him up and hold him on my lap while I tell him.

I explain as best as I can. I strive to keep my voice as normal as possible, as if words like
coma, brain bleed,
and
paralysis
are routinely part of our conversations. Eli is silent while I talk, his hands clenched, his gaze lowered.

“Do you want to go see him?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. He stands with a riotous lurch and shifts his weight forward, both hands reaching for the back of a chair, which I think, for a moment, he is going to throw. He is frightened, and his fear is unexpectedly volatile; a barely contained fury sparks off him. He glances in my direction. “I don’t know if I can.”

“You can,” I say.

Together we walk down the long hallway and into the glass
ICU
room. It is a fresh assault: the tubes and the machines and vents and drains and parched lips. Still hands. Swollen face, the swelling worse today. Simon is a fallen giant, and beside me Eli shatters into a thousand pieces, the way I did the night before.
The first lesson of motherhood,
my friend Rachel Rose wrote in her poem “Notes on Arrival and Departure,”
pretend you are brave
/
until you are brave
. I try. I pretend. But it is not enough for either of us.

“Dad?” Eli says. He stands still in the middle of the room, afraid to move any closer. “Simon?” His face has turned a fluid shade of oyster gray and sweat beads over his lip. I wonder if he will throw up. He turns to me, his eyes wild. “I can’t stay,” he says. “I can’t stay here.” As we leave the
ICU
, I am blasted by the force of his pain. It threatens to pull me under. I don’t know how to be there for him and still keep my head above water, still breathe.