I Was There the Night He Died (20 page)

I liked to surprise Sara when I'd finish the first draft of a new book—tell her, “I'm done,” and have her say, “Okay,” thinking it was just that night's work that was finished, then I'd say, “No—I'm
done
.” No matter what else she was doing, she'd drop it and we'd open a bottle of something and sit on the couch and allow me to feel like what I'd just done actually mattered.

“It's a good start,” I say.

“So I guess no one's going to die tonight then,” she says.

“No,” I say. “Anyone who was going to die, they're at peace now.”

We both scan the shelves again.

“I've actually got some good news too,” Samantha says.

“Oh, yeah? What's that?”

“I got accepted into McGill.”

“McGill? McGill University?”

“I'm pretty sure that's what they call it. Don't act so surprised.”

“It's not that,” I say. “I just thought you were going to apply to U of
T.”

“No, you wanted me to apply to U of T. I wanted to get as far away from my stupid family as possible and still go to a good school.”

“I didn't know you were so … ”

“Motivated? Together?”

“No, I … ” Samantha laughs, which allows me to laugh; we laugh.

“So go ahead,” she says. “Diss Montreal because it's not Toronto.”

“Montreal is great,” I say. “I bet you'll have a great time there. The main difference between the two cities isn't the language, it's that in Toronto people tend to have good taste in music but sit around listening to it in ugly buildings, whereas in Montreal there's all this beautiful architecture full of people listening to crappy music. It's a geographical and aesthetic conundrum for the ages.”

“I think I can handle that.”

“I'm sure you can.”

I feel very hungry all of a sudden, which makes sense, and I don't need a book and Samantha doesn't need any of my recommendations. She can find her own books just fine.

“I'm hungry,” I say.

“Okay.”

“Where can I make that stop?”

“The mall?”

“God.”

“You asked, I told. Don't shoot the messenger.”

“Anyway, let's get out of here,” I say. “This place smells mouldy.”

“That's because it is mouldy.”

Outside, it's definitely not mouldy; one hundred percent opposite, in fact, late-morning warmish windy and sunshiny and overall springtime springy. I shrug off my jacket and slip it over my shoulder. Samantha is wearing her usual black jeans, Converse, and hoody with the arms rolled down, but with the zipper undone at least. We stop at the corner; CCI is that way, the mall is this way.

“I guess I better get back,” she says.

“C'mon,” I say, “I'll buy you some poutine. It's the official carbo-load of your soon-to-be homeland.”

“I was on a spare. I shouldn't skip too much anymore. My acceptance was conditional on me not flunking out.”

“I don't think there's much danger of that,” I say. “Besides, we've both got something to celebrate, right? It's not a good idea to let the good things in life go unobserved.”

“Because it's bad karma or something?”

“No. Because they're so fucking rare.”

And so we walk. And talk, about nothing in particular, just enough to justify ambling along side-by-side in such very pleasant weather toward what someone decades ago dubbed the Downtown Chatham Centre but no one has ever called anything but The Mall. Water finds its level, and people and places become what they are, even small-town shopping centers.

“I was just trying to help, you know,” I say, the sunshine fooling me into speaking what's been on my mind for days now. “I didn't mean for you to feel bad.”

“So we're talking about
that
now, are we?”

“I understand, it's none of my business.”

“That's right, it isn't.”

“I know.”

Samantha stops walking. “You know, giving a shit isn't the worst thing in the world. I can at least … appreciate that. It was you thinking you could save me or something.”

“I never thought that.”

Samantha stares into traffic; stares long enough, I have time to realize I don't believe myself.

“You're right,” I say.

She looks at me. “It's been recently brought to my attention,” I say, “that maybe what's ordinary behaviour to me might be perceived by others as selfishness.”

“Sounds like something somebody says when they're breaking up with somebody.”

“Something like that. Anyway, maybe I wanted to help you not just because I wanted to help you, but because it helped me too.”

“Helped
you
? How?”

“Write my book. My music book.”

“You mean, like, writers' block or something?”

“More like the opposite.” I look to lose myself in the sidewalk traffic, but there's barely a pedestrian trickle. “Thinking I was helping you helped me help myself. Helped me get something done that part of me didn't want to get finished.”

Samantha starts walking again; so do I. “Did it work?” she says.

“I think so, yeah.”

“You're not sure?”

“Who is?”

I open the door to the mall and we step inside and head for the escalator and the food court on the second level. There, just as we're walking by Sears, I grab Samantha's hand and pull her inside. Her flesh meshed into my mine is as surprising to me as it must be to her, but I don't want to argue about it, this is something we have to do.

“C'mon,” I say.

“C'mon where?”

“You'll see.”

Some things—most things—change, but Sears isn't one of them. Not too much, anyway. The houseware section is still stocked with bedside lamps and massaging chairs and sock organizers and clocks. Lots and lots of clocks. There isn't the wind-up kind anymore, but there are floor model wall clocks and bedside clock radios, some with built-in iPod docks and some without, and even a few cheaply made grandfather clocks. I let go of Samantha's hand and lay out the plan like a veteran quarterback in the huddle.

“Just pretend like you're looking around, like everything you see is a delight to the eye. And every clock you see that has any sort of alarm, set it for two minutes, then four minutes, then six minutes, then eight minutes past one. I'll be doing the same, but with the odd numbered minutes. Don't let on that we know each other. Just act like you're giving each clock a careful once over before you make your purchase. When you're done, meet me over by the linen section, right over there.”

“Can I ask why?”

“No,” I say. “Now go.”

She rolls her eyes, she stands there doing nothing while I get busy, she eventually, reluctantly, languidly, sets to work: pushing buttons, clicking switches, finally finishing and moving on to her next ticking task.

Five minutes later, we've rendezvoused by the duvets. “Now what do we do?” she says.

“Now we wait and watch.”

The grandfather clock loudly chimes its time, and the salesman in his sports jacket and Sears badge raises an eyebrow, but calmly walks over to silence it.

“And?” Samantha says.

“And keep watching.”

Which we both do—watch the same man step behind the cash register to check out a customer only to have to excuse himself to quiet a shrieking clock radio, only to return to his register and have another clock radio beep beep beep and then another and then another keep him bouncing back and forth between the floor and the till as the lineup at the cash register grows longer and the people in it smile wider.

“Well?” I say

Samantha is smiling too, although not as much as I thought she would. “You've done this before, I take it?”

“My friend Eddie and I used to do this all the time when we were in high school.”

“
All
the time?”

“Okay. Once in awhile. Anyway, it's a classic. It'll never grow old.”

“Except pretty soon everyone will set the alarm on their phones and there won't be any such thing as clock radios anymore.”

The man behind the cash register is shaking his head and apologizing to the woman whose flat screen TV he's scanning.

“Let's go and eat,” I say. “I don't think I've ever been hungrier in my life.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Fourteen

 

 

 

I was against having a funeral
ceremony because there was only Uncle Donny and me, but he convinced me that it wasn't true, that there were other people who would want to say goodbye.

“Like who?” I said.

“Some of the guys he worked with,” he said. “Some of the guys we grew up with.”

“Then why didn't any of them come and see him when he was at Thames View?”

“Some of them did. At the beginning. But after awhile, you know, I mean … ”

I did know. After awhile, there wasn't much point in visiting someone who isn't them anymore and who doesn't recognize who you are either. That's what family is for.

Uncle Donny was right; it was the right thing to do. I didn't know most of the people there, and the ones that I did know I didn't know well, but it was good for them to see Dad one last time and it was good for Uncle Donny and me to be reminded that before he was what he became, he was him. We watched them put the casket with Dad in it into the earth next to my mother.

 

* * *

 

The people who wanted to buy
the house were still interested when I asked Laura to contact them, and all we had to do was knock two thousand dollars off their counter-offer to get the deal done. What the hell. I'm glad for the money—glad to be free of my mounting Visa bill most of all—but I'm also glad that somebody who actually likes the house will get to live in it. Everything I'm keeping is packed into three boxes, and I've left the beds and the practically brand new fridge and stove and the dresser drawers and all the rest of it for the buyers. A young couple can always use a jump start on their new life.

The windows are open—the windy but almost-warm day deserves it—and while I'm double-checking room-by-room that I haven't forgotten anything, I see Samantha not sitting, but actually swinging on the swing. It's a little after one o'clock on a Saturday afternoon and the park isn't ours alone, there's a small boy and his father attempting to fly a kite.

“Hey,” I call though the bedroom-window screen.

“Spring cleaning?” she says.

“More or less. Come on over.”

Samantha goes up, comes back down—“All right,” she says—goes up, comes back down.

In the time it takes her to knock on the front door, I've finished making my rounds, anything that I've left behind destined to go missing forever. It was a good thing I was so careful: at the back of my dad's empty underwear drawer, several unopened Lifesavers Books, the gift I gave him every year at Christmas as soon as I started making lawn-cutting money because he let me believe he liked them so much.

“Still knocking when you don't have to,” I say, letting her in.

“There are worse habits than politeness.”

Once we're standing in the living room surrounded by all of my stuff—the boxes, my suitcase, my laptop, the record albums I've eBay-accumulated since I've been in Chatham—it's clear that there isn't much left to say. Which is fine, but isn't the greatest timing. Life rarely breaks down into a tidy three-act structure. Too bad for life. Too bad that it's too bad.

“What time's your train?” Samantha says.

“My Uncle's picking me up around 2:30.”

We both survey the room, searching for something to see. I see something first.

“Why don't you take this?” I say, going over to the record player and receiver and speakers still plugged in, but almost forgotten on the floor by the couch.

“I don't have any records.”

“You could get some. Even the cooler whipper-snapper bands that you're into are doing vinyl pressings these days. And you know by now how much better they sound than what you hear on an iPod.”

“So you say.”

“Because it's true.” I unplug the cord and put the speakers on top of the turntable's dust cover.

“But what am I going to do with it when I go to Montreal?” she says.

“Take it with you. Why wouldn't you take it with you? Just promise me you'll get a new needle sooner than later. You owe it to your records.”

Samantha smiles, shrugs, puts out her hands for me to load her down. Which I do, but there's one more thing she needs.

“Pick one,” I say, fanning the records across the kitchen table.

“Those are the ones you paid a lot for on eBay, though, aren't they?”

“Not so much. Anyway, I can afford it. Set the record player down for a minute and choose one. You need a record if you're going to have a record player. And this way at least I'll know you got a good one to start with.”

In spite of herself, once she starts going through the pile I can see she's becoming interested. She takes in the covers; she scans the back of the albums; the ones that are gatefolds she can't help but open up and inspect. “I don't know any of these people,” she says. “How would I know which ones I'd like?”

“They're all good, believe me.”

“That doesn't mean I'd like them all.”

“Just go with your gut, then,” I say. “Pick one that jumps out at you.”

She works through the pile again backwards, stops at Mother Earth's
Bring Me Home
.

“Who's this?” she says.

“Tracy Nelson is the lead singer. She's the real deal. Sort of R&B, sort of folk-rocky, kind of hippie-country. What made you choose this one?”

Samantha holds up the record. “I liked the picture of the dog on the back.”

It's then that I recognize that it's a sealed record, that that was the reason I'd bought it online. Samantha can tell I'm not thinking about the photo of Tracy Nelson's dog.

“If you want to keep it, that's cool,” she says, placing it on top of the pile.

“It's not that,” I say. “It's just that it's a sealed record.”

“Does that make it more valuable or something?”

“Yeah, but that's not what's so great about a sealed record.”

“What is?”

“For one thing, they've never been played, so they'll never sound better than the first time you place the needle on the opening track. If they're original pressings like this one, they're also a time capsule. This particular record came out in 1971, and it's literally still 1971 inside that cellophane wrapper. And best of all, if you've never heard the actual music somewhere else before, you can't be disappointed, your entire life might change with one single song, there's no way of knowing it's not going to happen as long as that wrapper is still on. A sealed record is about as close to perfection as you can get.”

“But if you don't open them, they're pretty much useless, right?”

“I suppose you could look at it that way too.”

We both look at
Bring Me Home
by Mother Earth, Reprise Records, 1971.

“Is she—the lead singer—what's her name?“

“Tracy Nelson.”

“Right—Tracy Nelson. Is she, you know, one of those people you might have written about?”

“One of the people who died, you mean?”

“Right.”

“You tell me,” I say.

“What do you mean? Is she or isn't she?”

“I've got a new book I want to start on once I get home. A novel this time. Tracy Nelson belongs to you now. And don't use your fingernail to open the seal. Use something sharp, like a steak knife. What you want is a nice clean opening all the way across. But leave the rest of the wrapper on. It's not the same as having a sealed record, but it's the next best thing.”