Wait Softly Brother

Chapter 1: Day One

Day One

I pull off in Trenton and text my therapist because I am sad and I need to hear her voice. Mandy is actually my best friend, but, you know, same difference. There are two Harrier jump jets hovering overhead. The military base is close by and I could have gone straight to Mum and Dad’s, so why do I stop here? The jets are quiet, stealthy, but I can feel anxiety rising, like I’m being watched. I send Mandy that emoji with the skull and crossbones and then the broken heart one. It’s pathetic. I’m pathetic. And when she calls, I answer with the Bluetooth and tell her there’s been a death in the family and I’m heading to my parents for a while.

“Who died?”

“Me,” I say. “I died.”

She laughs nervously. Then goes quiet. Then asks, “Are you okay?”

I say, “You think about leaving your marriage, you fantasize about it, try it on in your mind, but when you actually go ahead and do it, it’s not at all like you thought. You couldn’t really fathom the injury it causes to yourself and then you think maybe no pain, no gain. Then it turns out that it hurts other people, too, and the narcissism that led to you leaving, that self-protective ego thing – or so you told yourself when you did it – is actually serving no one. Or maybe it is serving some unconscious need.”

She really is an analyst. So I know to add that last.

And she bites the bait. “So, you’re on a healing journey.”

Of course, I hate that kind of sentimentality. I picture the font it comes in and it nauseates me. I take a long, slow breath. I stare at the road, at the rain as it starts up again, listening to her voice soften. “Kathryn?” she says. “Are you there?”

“Yes,” I whisper. I’m wondering if it is bad form to yell at her. I don’t because, even though I need to yell, she doesn’t deserve it. It’s me I need to yell at. So I say that “it feels like more of a terrible wound. I keep thinking about the mystic Margery Kempe and all of her weeping and wailing.”

“Tell me what happened. Go slow.” She’s such a good person. I’m so lucky.

I say, “It started yesterday. I went out to the back patio to drink my tea. The first day warm enough to do so this spring. And, Mandy, there was a dead cardinal out there. The wind picked up its feathers and ruffled them prettily.” And I’m sobbing.

“Poor thing,” she says, about the bird or about me I am not sure.

“Such a sorry sight to see it robbed of flight. I suppose it hit a window.” Our house is replete with windows, looks out over the lake. It’s worth millions. Enough for all manner of freedoms, you’d think. “I put it in a shoebox and tossed it in the garbage can.”

“And that did it.”

“Yeah, it was the start of a very ugly argument. One of those arguments that dredges up the s**t of generations. One there’s no coming back from. It started with me saying I was struggling with my manuscript. That I needed to know more about Wulf, and he said, ‘Your brother is never coming back no matter how much ink you spill,’ and I blew a f*****g gasket.”

This morning in the doorway, it’s me and Matthew and the boys – Magnus, Ross and Harry. They are just old enough, teenagers all three of them, to repress why I might be leaving and so abruptly. It’s not them, I tell them. Which only leaves one person to blame. They turn and stare at their father, who shows us his palms as if their bloodlessness is evidence of innocence. He says, “What? I didn’t do anything.” At which I scoff because this is precisely the problem. These arguments go round and round. Twenty years of frustration, fights that give in to incremental change, that end in lackadaisical, predictable backsliding. Fights that result in him continuing to do nothing, to not be there, to annex himself from us under the guise of work.

“I hope you’ll be happy now,” he says to me the night before I leave.

“It’s not happiness I’m after,” I say.

He says he thought we would be one of those marriages that survived because we lead such separate lives.

It’s like I’m a wayward character in a story I suddenly refuse. For the first two acts, I liked the drama, the rising action, while also waiting for the main players to lock into their respective arcs, to dare to engage, to risk change. But somewhere along the plot it’s clear that it’s me who is changing, me who has outgrown this story, me who finally walks.

“You’ve changed.” His tone is accusatory.

“Yes! Yes, I have.” For that is what I thought characters were supposed to do. That is how narrative works and how could I not? How could I refuse the call to change?

I say, “It’s never been happiness I wanted. Not really. I wanted a marriage.” I wanted the fairy tale is what I mean.

Be careful what you want.

“Are you sure?” he says. By which he means there will be no going back. By which he means I can’t turn the clocks back on this decision once I make it. Because, whatever happiness or unhappiness might mean to him, he will never reflect, never puzzle, never confront the piece of this story that belongs to him. He’s churlish standing in the doorway to the house like there’s something there he won’t ever let me have back. But the thing I wanted, that’s been a husk for years. He’s a minor character in this. The sort that doesn’t change at all. And the character he won’t change from is one I can no longer abide. You know the part of the Hollywood blockbuster where the hero blasts through fire and escapes? That’s me. Only the fire is a suburban home with a lonely housewife.

O, simpering cliché!

And when I am done telling Mandy all this, and apologizing for trotting out the same old, same old, she says, “I support you.” And for this I am grateful. I watch the aircraft accelerate and disappear. And then she says, “A novel about Wulf?”

“Well, autofiction.”

“What’s that? Like memoir but not true? Kathryn, Wulf never lived.”

“I know. I know.” That in itself feels sad enough to occupy a story.

I get off the phone and drive on, up the 401, buzzing to the Batawa exit, an entire town built around a shoe factory. Then I head north, up through Frankford, across the Trent-Severn Waterway, and farther north, snaking through Stirling to that godforsaken plot. It’s still raining. The culvert under the laneway is conducting a tumult of water and there are pools and vernal ponds dotting the front field. The old cattle pond has burst at its seams. A couple of ducks airlift as I pull up. I’m driving backwards in time, back to the home where I grew up, where Mum and Dad still live, in a land so rocky even sheep can barely be sustained – a place where the oceans receded after the last ice age, leaving a landscape prone to bog and cedar copse, sweet air, mosquitoes and a history of depression. The land the Scots claimed because it reminded them of the home they’d left, not stopping to consider how their expansion might affect those currently occupying it. The stone croft house where I was raised was built five generations ago. A solid edifice to misery and my family’s devotion to it.

The front door swells shut in the spring and no one ever uses it anyway – too fancy for the likes of us. So, I’m at the old side door, the one through the kitchen. I should have called first.

“What’s going on?” Mum says. Dad’s head pokes out behind her.

“Invite her in, at least,” he says.

“Of course.” Mum shifts aside.

It’s all I can do to sputter out that we’ve argued again, Matthew and I, with the boys all throwing in their two cents, making it worse.

“I couldn’t stand it anymore,” I say.

Her eyes are bright with this information, as if leaving is a possibility she has never considered, as if I have opened up a portal into some grand venture. Then the brightness collapses into an accusatory twinge, her cheeks alive with fear. “So, you just left?” Mum says. A whole lifetime unfolds in an eyeblink. “It can’t be all that bad.”

“Mum,” I say, “it’s been years of not-all-that-bad.”

“And let me guess, you want to stay here.”

I nod, chastened, barely in the door, water now heaving out of the sky and glacier-cold tears, plenty of them, runnelling down my face. I’m calving some horrendous disaster. I can’t decide whether my anguish is about the story I can’t manufacture about Wulf or the one I can’t contain about my marriage. I keep thinking maybe I have picked my marriage apart in pursuing Wulf. It is true that if you start to scratch at the threads of any narrative, you discover it is just another enchantment. You discover there is no such thing as realism. All of it just made up. All of life, all of everything.

I’m sobbing by now, bent over on the couch. No one ever talks about how hard it is to start a story over again.

“Oh, honey,” says Mum, and Dad goes to put the kettle on since words fail him in the primordial way they seem to fail all men.

Mum tucks the Woolrich blanket around me, and Dad hands me a proper cup of tea. They stand there in a kind of tableau, assessing me, waiting for whatever comes next. Dad eventually says, “You poor bairn,” and Mum snickers. The Gaelic always sets her off, since it is not him but rather his own father speaking through him. He c***s his eyebrow at me with some expectation that I will give them reasons, calm their anxiety.

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” I say. And then I dare to say the thing I have been thinking about. I’m trying to make the big deal it is seem like no big deal, to minimize my desire. “I’m writing about Wulf.”

They fold their arms across their chests and nod, mouths arcing to the devil or hell, I do not know which. “There’s nothing to say,” Mum says. Dad just looks stern because, of course, she is right. “Maybe you should call Matthew and apologize. Twenty-five years is a long history to leave.”

“He took a mistress,” I say. Which is strictly speaking true, but it was some years ago and is only a loose thread in the larger yarn. Something I am not above using, though, since it is shorthand for “not my fault, really.” They soften a little but not enough to get me all that far.

“Poor bairn,” says Mum. She is sarcastic of course. There is nothing she has not already seen in her long life. She’s thinking, ‘What’s a mistress, in the long view?’ Mum’s eyes flit to Dad with the scrutiny of one who has stayed and conquered, and something, some energy of that or some secret past, concusses the room.

“You made a promise to Matthew,” says Dad.

Mum nods.

The edifice of marriage – those who’ve committed to it, who protect it to death do they part. To be buried side by side, I think, as the ultimate goal of life, the measure of a successful union. Dad clears his throat and says, “I’d like to call Matthew; I feel sorry for him.” He starts to shuffle toward the stairs, to make a private call.

“Sorry for him?”

He stops and stares me down. “Yes, sorry for him. Who will cook for those boys?”

“So, I’m a charwoman, then?”

“Don’t be stupid.” He ambles down the hallway to the kitchen, where the old landline resides. They keep it for when storms take out cell service, which is more and more often these days.

“I wish you’d sit down,” I call after him. He turns and looks at me while I plead: “Tell me the story of Wulf.” I know it hundreds of times over, long inscribed as it is. It’s old family lore, but we like a silly old tale to keep us tethered to one another. I give him the puppy eyes, make myself irresistible. “Please,” I say. “Tell it to me again.”

And he returns and lowers himself into the La-Z-Boy, switches the heating pad on and settles in. He has not taken his eyes off me the whole time, like prey gauging a cat’s pounce.

“It was a time of great sorrow in the family. We were just the two of us, before you and your sisters came. And your grandmother so aloof. The McIvers do not really do any sort of emotion.”

“Except me.”

“Yes, you are exceptional in that regard.”

“What did he look like?”

“Ugly. Like every baby. A wet little nothing.”

“He came and he went, I always said,” adds Mum. She is rocking a little. “I do wish you wouldn’t dwell so.”

“Mum went into shock. Her organs were failing and the doctor, and this was unusual at the time, called me into the delivery room.”

“I was dying.” Mum says it like an accusation, as if I might have been the culprit in her demise.

“Let Dad tell it.”

“The doctors said that one or the other could be saved but not both. Of course, I chose your mother.”

“Do you ever regret it?”

They laugh.

“Well, you’d not be here,” Dad says. He clears his throat. “The priest came and did his priestly thing. I named him Wulf as your mother and I had previously discussed, after the poem. He was buried before your mother had recuperated enough to know he was gone.” Mum looks at Dad, mutters something about the old story being just that, a story. I say I know that but just the same. It’s lore and that is its own sort of home, is it not? She tilts her head in reluctant agreement, the clenching along her jaw a path so well-trod, she’s got grooves there.

I think of the time before houses and people. I think of the ancient ocean spread out over the land. I think of all manner of sea beasts that cavorted here, right beneath where I now sit. Whales – narwhal, beluga – and other sea creatures. Shark. Walrus even, some say. Seal. And then, though I know it is whimsical, I think of the basement filled to the brim with salt water, the lap of tide, a concrete lung filling and emptying. This is nonsense, of course. The sea was long gone before the stones were piled to make this farmhouse. Before it was built into a knoll facing south to veil against the weather, my great-grandfather chiselling and setting the lime mortar between these stalwart boulders.

“Where do you think the dead go when they go?” I say now. I think I might be bringing Mum to the edge of tears, for she knows I am thinking of wee Wulf. And I am not ashamed to say that I do not care. I would be happy to see some feeling. But no.

“They haunt us,” she says. And to keep it together, she sniffs and says that if I want to stay, I will be put to work. “Speaking of ghosts, we are clearing out the pig shed.”

They’ve been hoarding for years, accreting to the hoard that five past generations of McIvers have stacked in this space. The sediment of not-letting-go, mould and mouse excreta.

“That sounds fair,” I say.

“You’ll find all sorts of stories in there, that’s for sure.”

“I only really want one,” I say, a retort they ignore.

They say, “Well,” and glance to one another, then rise in unison. They are creatures of habit and it is time for their afternoon constitutional. I watch them through a north-facing window as they meander in their wellingtons. I love them, I think, their old bodies moving in sync. It would have been nice to stay married for all time like them. I wanted that. I stand there overlong, recalling the supple skin along Matthew’s clavicle, how I used to snuffle and bite him there. What is the difference between a ghost and a memory, I wonder, and where does adoration go when it goes? I think it stays to haunt us, too.

My parents are long on their walk. I give up waiting for them. The tea in my mug is cold, the milk puckered on its surface, so I settle on the couch for a nap. I shudder away thoughts of Matthew and the boys, the flutter of my jacket as I threw it in the car, the way the suitcase I hastily packed clipped my leg to bleeding as I heaved it into the trunk. They’re like photographs seen from the distance of ages. I can’t take any of it in. I hear my phone ringing and make myself impervious to its jangle. It stops and begins and stops and begins again, as I drift in and out of sleep. Its persistence foretells. I reach for it eventually and swipe it open.

“Hi,” Matthew says. “How are you?”

“Tired,” I say. “Really f*****g tired.” I say goodbye before he gets anything more out. He calls back and I put the device on silent, mutter at my phone to shut the f**k up, and then there is, for some long minutes, quiet.

I wake up with Mum and Dad peering at me. Dad is waving a soup ladle.

“Is she awake?” says Mum.

“Dead to the world.”

I try to keep my eyes from fluttering. “Awake,” says Mum. “You can’t fool the fool.”

I shake my head, mutter, “Not awake. Dreaming.”

“The soup will grow cold,” says Dad.

I heave myself up from the couch, grab a Kleenex and empty my nose. The dinner table itself is something from Denmark circa 1970. The chairs match, upholstered in black Naugahyde. There is fresh-baked bread, sliced and warm, and an immaculate pat of salted butter on the table. Each plate is willow patterned and flanked by the requisite silver, heavy and ancient, hauled over the ocean with a class expectation that never materialized. Great-grandmum’s dowry. The napkins are folded into little snails and nestled up to the wineglasses. There are salad bowls and a mended tureen at the centre of all this. My father serves, and then they wait for my hands to clench in prayer.

“May we thank God for this bounty, and thank Him for the safekeeping of family,” says Dad, raising an eyebrow in my direction.

“For richer, for poorer,” I mutter. “Until death do us part.”

“Now, Kathryn,” says Mum. And once I’ve eaten, she leans in and gives me that look, one that would chill even the devil to the bone. “You’ll want to go to your room, now. It’ll be an early day of sorting tomorrow.”