Frances Itani - Requiem

“You’re driving. All this way. By yourself.”

I hear a long sigh and have a sudden image of Kay standing at a picture window in her Alberta home, looking out at a disc of sun hovering over flat, golden plain. No, there will be nothing golden this time of year in Edmonton. Last summer, when she moved from one neighbourhood to another, she wrote to say that her new house is close to the ravine and the University of Alberta—where she has worked as a counsellor for many years. For all I know, she might be staring into the depths of a crevasse, or at rows of houses, or at spring snow melting in a parking lot. After the enforced years in the camp, Kay has always hated the mountains. She feels squeezed between them every time she drives to B.C., says the mountains press in on her lungs until she’s short of breath. Maybe now that her children are grown and on their own, she’s finally found a place where she can breathe deeply, no dips or peaks to interrupt her view. A place where she can retire in a year or two, in peace. Her husband, Hugh, has already retired, and Kay has told me that he loves having his time to himself now. He has all sorts of projects going, though she’s never said what kind of projects these are.

Basil reappears, having circled kitchen, laundry, dining room. His face looks up in innocence, but something is drooping from his jaw. He drags it across the floor and, without stopping, plops it at my feet and carries on. I watch his low-slung body disappear, sixty pounds of Basset Griffon, the Grand version. He’s predominantly white, with a mix of grey, black and apricot markings, the apricot showing through from a thick undercoat. He circles again, this time reversing direction. He’s been sticking his nose in the dirty laundry again, probably feeling ignored. Loping his way through an existential dog nightmare, perhaps.

“I’ll be alone,” I say into the phone. And now it’s Kay’s turn to be silent.

Who else would be with me? Lena has been dead more than five months. Greg returned to his studies on the East Coast and is back to living his own life. He left a week after the funeral, in mid-November. He was home again at Christmas, and we managed to get through muted festivities at Lena’s sister’s place in Montreal. Greg flew to Ottawa first, and we travelled together by train to Montreal. Neither of us wanted to drive because the roads were hazardous, covered in snow and ice.

Once in Montreal, we did our best to keep well-meaning relatives at bay—or were surrounded. One and the same, perhaps. There were always people around, people in every room. Was that by accident, or was Lena’s family orchestrating our grief as well as their own? When I think of those few days, I remember chairs crowded around the kitchen table, lineups for bathrooms in the morning, music turned up a little louder than necessary. I particularly remember the Sanctus of Berlioz’s Requiem , only the Sanctus, a solo tenor voice. It was a blend of pain and beauty, and I felt that the tenor, after singing, could only go offstage and weep. As for the answering women’s choir, they were intent on bringing solace from afar. The women sang as if something clear and important had to be said. Perhaps that is when something I was holding back fell away. Perhaps that is when I began to allow myself to grieve.

As soon as Kay and I hang up, I phone Greg to tell him about the trip—before I change my mind. It’s an hour later on the East Coast but he’s up, studying. He, too, is surprised at my sudden announcement.

“Hey,” he says, “you’re really going back? Through the mountains? All the way?”

“Through the Rockies,” I tell him. “As far inland as the camp, but not all the way to the Pacific. Do you want to come? It’s been a while since we crossed the country by car.”

“I’d love to, Dad, but I have term papers to finish. After exams, I have to prepare my research project.”

Greg has a spot in a summer fellowship program in Massachusetts—exactly where he wants to be. He deserves to be excited about this.

“I don’t have all the dates figured out yet,” he says. “But maybe we can get together in Cape Cod while I’m there. Or even earlier. I’ll let you know as soon as everything is confirmed.”

During the conversation, while he tells me what he’ll be doing at Woods Hole, the Oceanographic Institution, I find myself calling up a memory of a time when he discovered a dolphin skull on the shores of Passamaquoddy Bay. Almost eleven years ago. The Fundy tide was low; we’d been beachcombing. The skull had washed up on brown and slippery rocks, the elongated bones of its distinctive rostrum bleached by the sun. Greg easily recognized it for what it was, a perfect discovery for a ten-year-old. The skull stank for months, but we dried it in the sun in the backyard an entire summer, until it was odourless enough to be in his room. It’s still there, on a shelf with his other marine treasures.

We say goodbye, I hang up the phone and lean forward to see what Basil has dropped at my feet. It’s a message, a dismembered sleeve, a rag, a duster tugged up and out of the hamper. Part of a sweatshirt Lena used to wear around the house.

I recognize this as a measure of Basil’s distress. He’s a pack animal. And a member of his pack—our pack—is missing.

Five-thirty in the morning and I’ve been dreaming of Lena. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, wrapped in a cream-coloured robe that I don’t recall, her bare legs crossed at the knee. It was the way she always sat: on kitchen chairs, on the chesterfield, in the seats of airplanes. But there she was, in the dream, her dark hair pushed back behind her ears. My first thought was: Lena is okay. She can move, she can speak . She was teasing, telling me I’d slept the sleep of the high-strung and uneasy. Before that, she curled into my body deliberately, her skin as soft as it was when she was in her twenties, when I first met her.

Then I woke, or thought I woke, to see her sitting beside me. She raised an eyebrow, as if waiting for me to say something. But when I reached for her, she was gone. Did I call out? Perhaps that was part of the dream—believing I had.

I glance at the clock, 5:18, shove back the covers and force myself, will myself, to get up, even though it’s still dark. I go to the window, naked, and pull back one of the curtains. Search for the line of river on the northern edge of the city and feel the disappointment as I realize, in the fog between sleep and awareness, that this is not the river of my childhood after all. So real is my childhood river, I can call up at any moment its steep banks, the steady rush of fast and muddy water, the ribbon of blue-green coming in from the side.

I push down the fluttering, the extra beats inside my chest, try to smother the sense of panic. And as I stare out, I recall an earlier dream. Or perhaps fragments of the same dream, a prequel of sorts.

I had been moving from one place to another, as one’s dream-self does, changing scenes in a way that makes no sense to the conscious mind. I was walking in drizzling rain, searching for the Fraser River below the camp. As I descended the steep path, I caught glimpses of a horizontal rope of cloud stretched low above the turbulent water. I was wet and miserable and fatigued, and lay on the ground in that damp, leaden air, hoping to 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.