And finally there was a fourth, lone photograph, of Kelli sitting on her stool, looking out the window. It had been taken about twenty years ago, and thirty-year-old Kelli sat in precisely the same posture and attitude with which she had sat on that stool every day since. She weighed less then. Her hair was more blond than silvery, and her shoulders had less of a hunch to them. But the essential Kelli hadn’t changed.

My eyes shifted back and forth between the photographs as the light hummed overhead. But the humming didn’t reassure me anymore. Seeing the pictures in this new context made them seem alien. Here was Irene looking perfect, here was me looking a way I never looked, here was Kelli looking, as always, like Kelli. Why would Irene have plucked these particular photos from the album, the end tables, the knick-knack shelves, and placed them here? They were lined up side by side, in a bit of a semi-circle. Place a candle before them and you’d have a shrine.

14

Even though I had cut back on home care at maybe the stupidest time possible — the time when things were genuinely about to get busy after weeks of numbness and inertia — I was slowly starting to realize that I was doing ok. I didn’t feel nearly as oppressed and put upon as I had during those endless post-funeral days, when the care workers dutifully arrived to take Kelli down for baths — and out for walks, in Trevor’s case — and therefore off my hands for an hour or so every afternoon. That brief, daily reprieve was a freedom I had, at the time, insisted to myself I needed. But now I didn’t seem to need that freedom after all. Why, I wondered, had I placed such stock in it for so long? In being alone, unhindered? Hadn’t I had my fill of unhindered solitude these past few years? It turned out that I had.

I was entering a new phase. Instead of feeling burdened by my role as Kelli’s keeper, now I felt energized and dynamic. Kelli was a problem to be daily grappled with, and every day that I grappled with her — to whatever degree of success — gave me a sense of purpose and accomplishment. For one thing, I started taking Kelli everywhere with me, the way my mother used to do — wrestling her into her jacket and prodding her into her shoes and nagging her into the car to come with me on errands and anything else I felt like doing. Kelli and I went to the bank. We went grocery shopping. We met Jessica for coffee to sign paperwork for the sale of the house. When we were feeling cooped up, we drove down to the waterfront and rode the commuter ferry across the harbour and back. When we didn’t feel like cooking, we took ourselves out to Boston Pizza, or down the hill to the Brass Rail — a favourite special-occasions restaurant of my mother’s — where you could order a slab of pan-fried haddock so large it hung off either side of the plate.