Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

I will tell Hans that you kept the key to Mrs. Klippenstein’s empty house and let yourself and several local men in, at night, to engage in adulterous activity. Whatever you say to refute my statements will not be believed, trust me.

You have a reputation in this town as being crazy, by which I mean demented, and your words are worthless. Will you reconsider?

Were you expecting her to take you back after calling her a nutcase and threatening to turn her over to The Mouth? You don’t think flowers would have been more effective?

I have a theory, though: It was grief that drew my mom to you and love that pulled her back. Love for Ray. And for me and for Tash. And for the perfect idea, at least, of us being together again. There are so many perfect ideas in this town. But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief. It does. Love is everything. It is the greatest of these. And I think that we all use whatever is in our power, whatever is within our reach, to attempt to keep alive the love we’ve felt. So, in a way, the only difference between you and me is that you reached out and used the church — there it was as it always has been, what a tradition — and I stayed at home, in bed, and closed my eyes.

Life being what it is, one dreams not of revenge. One just dreams. I could smell that hot June wind again — it was starting up for another day, blowing warm sweet promises, getting ready to break the hearts of all the Mennos in East Village one more time.

And that’s when the neighbour kid rolled over in the grass and put her arm around me and rubbed my bald head and I whispered thank you. I meant thank you to Ray for, in the midst of his own multitude of crap and bewilderment, knowing one true thing. That I would never have left him and that if I were ever to get out of that town, he would have to leave first. That’s two things, I heard him say. And the neighbour kid said you’re welcome, because she was a polite kid and thought I was talking to her. She was a good kid. We were all good kids. Amen. And then it was time for me to leave and for her to go home.

The idea of my mom leaving town to spare my dad the pain of having to choose between the church or her, knowing it would kill him, was the story I liked the best. The other possible ending to the story of my mom’s shunning was that it opened a door for her, a way out of this place, which raised the possibility that my mother had never really loved my father, or that she had loved him years ago but had since stopped loving him, or that she loved him but not more than the idea of being free. That it was just a convenient excuse. That could be the truth. I don’t know.

Did she have a thing with you because she was angry with Ray for keeping her in a town that she knew would inevitably break up her family? Did she live every day with the conundrum of wanting to raise her kids to be free and independent and of knowing that that’s just the kind of kid a town like this chews up and spits out every day like happy hour? The Mouth had suggested once that my mother might have killed herself out of guilt and regret. I think it was the ending he most enjoyed. The typically grim outcome that made sense to him.

Let’s be realistic, he said, which had made even my dad laugh out loud. But it did make me wonder. If she had planned to travel far away from this place why had she left her passport behind in the top drawer of her and my dad’s dresser? Was her body at the bottom of the Rat River, her hazel eyes wide open, staring in eternal mock horror at the flailing limbs of fifteen-year-olds being forced underwater in baptism by her brother, The Mouth? Or was she alive and well and selling Amway or something in some tourist town on the Eastern Seaboard? Or maybe she had finally managed to get to Israel and was working as a courier in Tel Aviv?

Had my dad really gone to pick garbage off mountains or was he also at the bottom of the Rat — no, I preferred the first story, the one about sacrifice and pain, because it presented opportunities, of being reunited, of being happy again, somewhere in the real world, our family, and because it was about everlasting love and that’s what I like to believe in. The stories that I have told myself are bleeding into a dream, finally, that is slowly coming true. I’ve learned, from living in this town, that stories are what matter, and that if we can believe them, I mean really believe them, we have a chance at redemption. East Village has given me the faith to believe in the possibility of a happy family reunion someday. Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life.

I put my leather bracelet between the doors of Clayton’s mom’s house and got back into the car. I knew she would find other ways of keeping Clayton alive in her imagination. I lit a Cap, pulled the seat up a little closer to the wheel, found a half-decent song on the radio, and drove.

That sounds good, right? Actually I haven’t dropped off the bracelet yet but I will. Soon. I’m pretty sure of that. I’ve got the car. All I have to do is sell the house. Good solid unfurnished bungalow. Perfect for families. Going cheap. Truthfully, this story ends with me still sitting on the floor of my room wondering who I’ll become if I leave this town and remembering when I was a little kid and how I loved to fall asleep in my bed breathing in the smell of freshly cut grass and listening to the voices of my sister and my mother talking and laughing in the kitchen and the sounds of my dad poking around in the yard, making things beautiful right outside my bedroom window.

Hearty thanks to Michael Schellenberg and his all-star editing abilities that combine a Zenlike calm with heat-seeking missile precision and to Carolyn Swayze for gently reminding me that writers write and to Paul Tough for reading earlier versions and to Cheryl Cohen for shepherding a thousand details to safety and of course, as ever, to NCR for guarding all the exits.

MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of two novels, Summer of My Amazing Luck (nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award and winner of the John Hirsch Award) and A Boy of Good Breeding (winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award), and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life (winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction). She has written for CBC, This American Life (NPR), Saturday Night, Geist, Canadian Geographic, Open Letters and The New York Times Magazine, and has won the national magazine gold medal for humour. Miriam Toews lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.