Bed linens and clothing were to go to an orphanage. Furniture, dishes and cookware were to be donated to the church for their annual charity sale. For my father: a cracked-glaze teapot and tube radio. Some inexpensive jewellery, my grandfather’s pocketknife, photographs and books. Also, my grandmother’s paintings and the mask that hung on the wall. The milky one I used to want to lick when I was a little boy. According to my grandfather’s labelling system, the radio had been a gift to my grandmother for their forty-fifth wedding anniversary. The mask had been a curio, a keepsake purchased at a flea market in Oslo. Apparently, my grandfather wrote, it had originally come from Paris.

The work was tedious and your mother and I were newlyweds. On the last night, amidst boxes and a house now cold and echoey in its new state of transition, we lit a fire and candles, and I threw a silk handkerchief over a standing lamp. When there is nothing but picture hooks and stains on the walls, when the carpets are rolled up and cushions packed away, a house becomes sharp and mean. I put the handkerchief over the lamp to soften the shadows and to make the room feel a little more inviting. And we were a bit drunk. We weren’t thinking clearly. We ate our dinner on the floor in front of the fire and drank more wine and talked about our future, about my toy business and your mother’s wish to go to university, and we talked about the children we were both eager to have. We schemed and we made love and then we fell asleep, tangled together like two puppies. It couldn’t have been much later when I woke up to a burning, sweet smell. A room translucent with smoke. At first I thought a spark had come off the fire and ignited a box or some other old, flammable thing, but when I turned to wake your mother up I saw the lamp, alight, tip to the floor.

I stood unmoving, choking on smoke. My eyes, Bear. I have never forgotten the sting. Couldn’t see for the tears. While I stood there like an ass, your mother attacked the lamp with a blanket, punching out the flames. If she hadn’t acted so quickly, we would have lost everything. She burned the palms of both hands that night, and a dash of her wrist on the right side. Over time the scars faded so that you wouldn’t know they’d ever been there unless you knew the right place to look, just on the nub of her wrist. A shiny redness, which only she and I knew was there, because she was my wife, and this was part of our story, and I knew where to look.

22

Nora

Toronto, 1987

Nora plucked at the coarse, white deer hairs stuck to her jeans, licked her thumb and rubbed a shadow of blood from the webbing between her other thumb and forefinger. In the hospital now, dim yellow lights and the smell of boiled chicken and Anouk asleep on a high, mechanized bed. Nora and Red had closed the curtain around them and sat in stiff metal chairs on the same side of the bed. Three other children asleep in this room but not children with CF, because children with this condition could not be mixed for the risk of the bacteria they might spread to one another. Nora watched Red, asleep also with his chin on his chest and his cap pulled over his eyes, and she looked at his hair, the way it curled up under his hat, then flowed over his ears like it always had and probably always would.