Forgiveness (27 page)

How could my mom be here? How had it come to this? How could I put an end to it? But I knew, in truth, that my mom was stuck at rock bottom. She had one escape—alcohol. And it pushed her deeper.

In my heart, I knew there just wasn’t anything more she could give. My mom—the mom I had known as a child, that vibrant, healthy, loving, firecracker of a woman—had been extinguished. She was gone. She was not coming back.

Mom always returned to the Cecil’s basement. She found crevices in the rock’s bottom into which to sink deeper. Soon she was rarely leaving the apartment. Once the apartment became her universe, she rarely left her windowless bedroom. She would lie for days in the dark on a mattress on the floor. Stephen would bring her food and wine. Sometimes she ate; she always drank.

I knew she was lost to me. I knew there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. And that made me mad. It forced me to question the power of love.

Then, just when I needed it, someone came into my life who answered that question.

Jade. I adored her from the moment I saw her.

She had just moved to Medicine Hat from Assiniboia, Saskatchewan. The first time I saw her—actually only half of her—I fell for her fully. Our school lockers were in the same hallway. I remember catching a glimpse of part of her face behind her locker door before she clicked her lock closed and headed for the end of the hallway. I was smitten.

She, not so much. She thought I was arrogant and loud-mouthed. She was more right than wrong. In any event, I had my work cut out for me. It took me four years and a ballet to make my case.

My dad was promoting the Alberta Ballet’s tour stop in Medicine Hat. The company was performing
Swan Lake.
Tickets for the college theatre sold out quickly. Jade had been dancing since she was four years old and she was desperate to go. So Jade’s mom called my dad to see if there were any spare tickets. There were not, but Dad offered Jade a gig ushering for the night. She could sit on the stairs and watch the show if she wanted. Susan told me this. She knew under the circumstances I’d quickly become interested in the fate of Odette and Siegfried.

After folks were seated, the lights went down and the curtain came up. I scooched beside Jade on the fifth stair at stage right. I couldn’t see a thing on stage. I couldn’t have cared less. Watching Jade watch the dancers was life-changing for me. An artist watching art. Including the “May I sit here?” that I had just spoken, I had probably said fewer than a hundred words to her. But I remember sitting on that fifth stair and thinking:
This is the girl for me.
Sixteen years later, when the marriage videographer asked one of my groomsmen, Ryan Hehr, if I had told him when I knew I was going to propose to Jade, he laughed and said it was the night before our first date.

At summer’s end, Jade and I moved to Calgary. Jade taught ballet at a small dance studio. She rented a suite from a friend. Eric Van Enk, a lanky, toothy Dutch friend, and I rented an apartment just a few blocks west, close to the university. It was an arrangement that
worked out well. Eric was dating Jade’s roommate, so we would alternate places.

Whatever my student loan didn’t cover, working with my uncle Ron made up for. Though he was the most successful music promoter in the country, he still behaved like the eldest brother, making sure everyone in the family was okay. He’d have me work all the concerts he brought into Calgary. Halfway through a show, he’d pull me aside and slip a handful of bills into my jacket pocket. The money would pay my rent and allow me to take Jade out for dinner.

Jade and I were together all the time. We were together when I received my law school application response from Dalhousie. I held the sealed letter in my hand and called her. We met in the living room of her suite. She sat down on the couch, her feet together and her hands folded, her back straight. She wanted a no. I wanted a yes. I opened the letter. I had my way.

We both smiled. We had some decisions to make. We had a quiet dinner at her house and went to bed. I did, anyway. Jade sat up the entire night, thinking about moving to Halifax, a city we knew nothing about, thousands of miles away. That night, she tried to decide whether she was going to marry me or not. It took her all night. I think I just squeaked by. The next morning, her eyes were red with tiredness. But she was smiling.

“Let’s go,” she said.

We made a list of things to do once we got to Halifax.

1. Find a place to live.

2. Make friends.

That was as far as we got. We spent the rest of the day in bed.

We went back to Medicine Hat to say goodbye to our families and pick up a few items that we had left behind. At Jade’s parents’ place, we packed the last few inches of empty space into our weighed down Volkswagen Jetta. Dad was there to see us off. He said he was proud of me and to drive safely. Then he reached into his fanny pack and handed me thirty fifty-dollar bills.

“Gas money,” he said.

When we pulled out of the driveway, I saw Jade’s mom collapse into my dad’s arms. She was inconsolable. Jade didn’t stop crying until we reached the outskirts of Regina.

As Jade slept and I drove, I wondered why I was so insistent on moving to Halifax. Why put everyone through all this? There were plenty of good schools close to home. I didn’t know the answer, but I knew I felt lighter with each glance in the rear-view mirror.

We fell in love with our new city. Everything there was new. Except for the lingering concern about my mom. Two thousand miles couldn’t deter that uninvited guest. But we would be returning before we knew it.

The mid-December air was thick with fog. Our taxi driver struggled to wind through downtown Halifax. He thought we were crazy to go to the airport. He knew we’d be socked in. He was right. We sat at the airport waiting for the sun to rise and burn the fog off. It took five hours.

When we landed in Medicine Hat, the sky was crystal blue. We dropped our bags off at Jade’s parents’ and I popped down to Grandma’s for a visit. As I opened the door, the sweet smell of rice vinegar filled my nostrils. Grandma was busy making
inari
sushi. She wiped her hands, hugged me, and put on the kettle. We sat and had cups of
ocha.
We talked about my first semester of law school, how we were getting along in Halifax, the weather, who was coming down from Lethbridge over the holidays, the carpal tunnel in her left forearm, how busy Dad had been, and how quiet Grandpa Sak had been. The usual.

Then she suddenly shot up and looked around left to right. “I have some money. This is hush-hush.”

When it came to money with Grandma, it was always “hush-hush.” She pulled a crisp, new one-hundred-dollar bill from her pocket and handed it to me. I protested. My student loan was coming
in the next two weeks, I was fine. But I knew it was futile to resist. I thanked her and took the money.

My heart sank a little as I left Grandma’s because my next stop was to see Mom. It was always a crapshoot. I just didn’t know what I was walking into. And I had no way of knowing; her phone had been disconnected again. I parked in the side lot of the Cecil and girded myself with each step. I took a deep breath as I opened the hotel lobby door. The stairwell down to the basement seemed darker and dingier than the last time I had descended it. I stood at her apartment door listening for any clues as to what was happening on the other side. Silence.

I knocked and heard a faint hello from my mom.

“It’s me, Mom.”

“Mark!” Her voice sounded excited, but it took her an awfully long time to walk the ten steps from the living room couch—I was sure that’s where she’d been—to the apartment door.

When she opened it, I tried to hide my shock, my shame, my disappointment and disdain. But my eyes betrayed me. I knew she saw all of it.

She looked like a skeleton. Her bones poked out of her pale papery skin. Her fingers were so nicotine stained they looked burnt. It seemed as if she’d been sitting on the couch drinking and smoking the whole time I had been gone.

We moved over to the couch. Walking was becoming difficult for her. The running shoes she had bought second-hand were just too heavy. But it was all the store had that fit her.

We spoke about my studies, my new school, my new city. She was trying to keep the conversation about me. When she got up to go to the washroom, I snuck over to the small beer fridge in the kitchen. I opened the door as quietly as I could, hoping she would not hear. There was a bottle of black bean sauce, a box of cheap white wine, a bottle of mustard, and two end pieces from a loaf of bread. I lost myself in the bleakness of that fridge. Mom startled me when she opened the bathroom door. She hadn’t flushed the toilet.

“Oh, Stephen is bringing pizza home when he’s done his shift,” she assured me when she saw what I was looking at. I nodded.

She limped over to me. “It’s so nice to see you.”

“You too, Mom.”

I suggested we go out and get her some new shoes. She demurred. After a few minutes of probing, I got her to confess she hadn’t left the apartment in over a month. Going out brought on crippling panic attacks. She said she had agoraphobia. It kept her prisoner. She hadn’t seen or felt the sun in more than forty days. She hadn’t breathed fresh air. I looked around the apartment—it was a tomb.

It took an hour of persistence, but I convinced her to go out with me. As we left, I had to help her up the stairs. She was shaky on her feet and her hands were trembling; she was concentrating on containing her fear.

I only had the one hundred dollars that Grandma had just given me, but I wanted to get Mom some new shoes. Walmart had just opened in Medicine Hat, so we went there. Mom smiled at the Walmart greeter like we were walking into a luxury hotel.

“This is my son. He’s home from law school.” I smiled and held her arm.

We walked through an aisle stacked with women’s shoes. We found a few size six runners. I helped Mom sit down on a padded stool at the end of the aisle. The first pair were far too wide. Mom’s feet were slivers of flesh. The second seemed better. I laced her up, hunching over like Dad used to do when he tied my skates. The shoes felt light and they fit. I looked up to see what she thought. She was in tears. She hadn’t had a new pair of shoes in over a decade.

“They fit perfectly,” she said quietly.

Mom was walking a little better as we left. We returned to her apartment.

That was one of the last times I would see her. Standing in her decrepit kitchen, holding on to the counter to stand tall in her new, bright white sneakers.

I told her I loved her and I closed the door.

How could I?

How could I have closed that door?

In the winter of 2001, I was preparing for my final exams in second-year law. I would study in the bedroom while Jade was in the living room.

The phone rang and I picked it up.

“Mark.”

I almost dropped the receiver. I’d never spoken to Stephen on the phone. His voice was shaky, broken.

“Your mom is sick.”

No shit.

“Where are you?” I asked, already knowing the answer. I could hear the hospital’s intercom paging someone in the background.

“She’s
really
sick.”

“Is there a doctor or a nurse there?”

He put the receiver aside. I was glad for that. I could hear him ask the nurse to speak with me. “He’s in Halifax. He’s a lawyer,” he said.

I was glad I was in the bedroom. I knew I was going to need a moment alone after the call. I could hear the surprise in the nurse’s voice. “Are you Diane’s son?”

“I am.”

“Well, she is very sick. If I were you, I would come home as soon as you can.”

I’m ashamed to admit that the first thing to cross my mind was that I’d miss all my exams.

“Okay,” was all I could manage. “Can I speak to her?”

“She is not able to speak at this point.”

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. My stomach tied itself into a knot. I started to ask the same question with different words: How bad was she? What was the problem? But the only real question was: could she survive? I couldn’t ask that one.

The nurse didn’t have it in her to tell me. She put me on hold to talk to the attending doctor. She spoke across the ICU desk. “It’s Diane’s son. He’s calling from Halifax. He’s a lawyer.”

The nurse was being kind. She was humanizing Mom. The doctor clearly saw a yellowed skeletal vagabond in the bed down the hall. My being in law school made her more real, worthy of his time. But being in law school did not make me a better son. She was still dying in the bed down the hall. The doctor picked up the phone.

“Hi, I was just with your mom. She is very sick. You should come home right away if you can.”

“Is she going to die?”

“Yes.”

I had known this was coming. But I began to panic all the same.

“Is there anything that can be done? Surgery?”

“Mark—it’s Mark, right? Your mom is well past that. I’d come home on the next flight.”

Mom was
well past that.
It’s impossible to say when she had exceeded the point of no return. But I know one thing: when she did, she did it by herself. She was all alone. Her eldest son was busy living his life on the other side of the country.

I was still shell-shocked on the plane the next morning. How could this happen? How could I be two thousand miles away from this?

Somewhere over New Brunswick, the thought hit me like a tsunami.

If I could abandon my own mother, who in my life was safe?

It’s a fear I thought I’d never fully shake.

Daniel greeted me at the Calgary airport. He had been early; he had been waiting. We hugged but said nothing.

It was a bitterly cold night as we drove the Number One south to Medicine Hat. The windows were iced over. We didn’t speak much during that two-and-a-half hour drive. It was dark when we passed the Gas City sign.

We drove straight to the hospital. Daniel knew the room number. We took the elevator up to the sixth floor. Mom was lying on her back, asleep, alone in the dark room. The purple blouse and pants that she and Donna Stetic had picked out from Friday’s Image were neatly folded on the chair in the far corner.