I called 911 as Edmund picked you up off the floor. He was yelling for me to get out of the room. I was sitting on the floor next to the bedside table holding the hotel phone. Edmund kept hollering to get out of the room. You were in his arms. Edmund was in the doorway screaming, “Olive, get out.”

“Just a minute,” I screamed back. You were throwing up in his arms.

Edmund wanted me out of the room. The 911 operator wanted me to stay on the phone. “Just a minute,” I whispered and held the phone out to him. Edmund was wiping the vomit off your face with his sleeve. I dropped the phone and tripped on the gun, which flew across the room as I crawled along the floor. I was drooling on my fingers. The fire trucks arrived at the hotel and Ian came in wearing his firefighter gear. Edmund carried you to the elevator and Ian took you from there. Your arms draped over his shoulders, noises like a sick calf coming from you. I crawled after you while Edmund went back to the room.

It had once been a grand hotel with lavish Victorian gardens. Our parents had their wedding reception in the gardens. Their wedding album was in the attic. The photos were black and white, but the splendour of the flowers was still perfectly captured in the pictures. I remember when the garden was paved over. Edmund, he was long gone, in Vancouver then. You were sailing on Aylesford Lake that summer and I was working in the town tourism office beside the concrete wishing pool directing visitors to historic sites.

We didn’t have a church funeral for our father, just a burial ceremony in the little graveyard near Nate’s house. The trees were bare and the snow had not yet fallen. The air smelled of pine and rotting leaves. Edmund had decided on the ceremony because our mother was in bed crying for days. You’d wanted Dad cremated, wanted to wait until spring to scatter his ashes. But Edmund overruled you. He said Mum couldn’t bear to put it off. You stomped about the house. Shame and humiliation buried your anguish. Your anger was heavy, as though you had rocks in your pockets you couldn’t remove. And your rage when you saw the words Edmund insisted be chiselled into the marble tombstone.

Sometimes when I can’t stop thinking about what happened, I go back to the old hotel and sit in the lobby. The rooms have now been converted into cheap apartments. The lobby is even more rundown than it was when Dad died in the hotel room upstairs. Part of the lobby has been turned into office and commercial space. There is a liquor store and, across from it, a lawyer’s office, a criminal lawyer. It smells of cigarette smoke from the lawyer’s clients. It reminds me of you — how harsh you became after Dad died, how you always said it was criminals and poor people who smoked, the dead-end types.