Martin Sloane by Michael Redhill Page B

that’s a couple years later. I’d bring her tall glasses of ice water from the kitchen and lie in her lap between the rows. She’d sing “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and I thought it was a song about kicking people. One afternoon, she got into her truck and started out for Cortland, which was thirty miles away. She’d been making that trip a couple times a week by that point. This is 1972 now. She had pints and bushels of raspberries in the back, and she was probably tired from kneeling and picking all morning. Nobody ever figured out what happened exactly. She drove into a tree out on Route 8. She went through the windshield.
    Martin’s face hardened a little hearing that. It was clear it wasn’t the false part of the story, but he hadn’t been expecting such a thing in my past.
    She went over the hood, I continued matter-of-factly, and a few minutes after that, a local chicken farmer found her and she was sitting up against the tree “like she was in a church pew,” he told us later, and she was looking calmly across the road at the orchards. Her sunhat was in her lap, and mayflies were stuck in the berry juice all over the hood of the truck. When there were enough people on the scene to carry her off the hood and bring her across the street to someone else’s flatbed, four men crossed the road with her body high above their heads so they could watch for traffic. They took her to Cortland, I said. Where the hospital was. I stopped talking.
    Well, I know what part I want to be untrue, he said.
    Actually, it’s all true, I said quietly. The part I was about to tell you wasn’t going to be true, but I decided not to tell it.
    He nodded. What was it going to be?
    I was going to say that it was just one of those tragic things that doesn’t mean anything.
    Do you want to tell the real ending?
    No.
    I must have looked bad because he reached for me and pulled me gently across the bed and gathered me into himself. Later, we got dressed and went out for sup per and spoke of other things.
    By the fall of 1999, I had been living in an apartment on Havelock Street in Toronto for almost seven years. My backyard looked over a park where mothers gathered every Tuesday to stoke a stone oven that had been built there by the city. They baked bread in the oven and made fresh pizza for their kids, and afterwards they all sang songs together, songs my own mother had sung to me. The women outside my window would have been children when I myself had been a child and now they were mothers.
    I’d bounced back and forth from one place to another over the ten years, going from a basement to a flat and finally to a house, as if I were coming out of a long hibernation underground. It would have been a good decade in which to suffer a loss if I’d been able to get into all the healing that everyone was doing. I had co-workers in therapy, neighbours in yoga, and I briefly knew a man who drank his own urine. But keeping busy and the passage of time were the only things that helped. Coming up on ten years since I’d left the country of my birth, strangers no longer automatically lowered their eyes from mine. I did not give off rads of grief. I wore normalcy like a lead shield and sometimes I even smiled at people on the streets (something that Torontonians found stranger than open bereavement). Now I was a respected member of a teachers’ union. I bowled and I dated. Sometimes I laughed. And I was a citizen of another country, a citizen in
fact,
having given my motherland the old college try. In 1995 I’d become a Canadian.
    The fall, of course, was always the hardest, and from September to mid-October, I was restive. My mother had died at the very end of summer, and the only man I’d ever loved had vanished at the beginning of fall. Perhaps fall to winter wouldn’t have been so difficult, but passing over from the heat of summer to the cool comfort of fall brought with it the illusion that not all hope was lost. There were still leaves