The Fourth Part of Chapter 15: Past and Future

By now the snow was lying tramped down on the sidewalk, and lay ankle-deep in the garden; they had already received their first major snowfall, which had amounted to ten centimetres, the previous evening, and the street that morning looked like a scene out of a postcard, as the snow lay delicately on the branches of all the trees, weighed down the pine boughs, and accentuated the colourful Christmas lights.

While Patricia was on her way home from work at the city library, she decided that she needed to call Clarissa, considering that they had not talked in what seemed like a while to her. After two rings, Clarissa picked up.

“Hello,”

“Hi Clarie, it’s Pat,”

“Hi Pat. It’s nice you could call; I just left work,”

“So, I was just wondering how you’re doing; both Ryan and I are thinking of you,”

“That’s really kind of you. One of my co-workers, his name is Yvon, took me to a movie on the twentieth. He said he couldn’t stand my long face and wanted to cheer me up.”

“How did that go?”

“Okay; he said he even didn’t mind soppy love stories if they would cheer me up, but I said that wasn’t necessary, of course,”

“What did you see?”

“It was a buddy comedy, I can’t remember the name,”

“How is Yvon normally?”

“He’s normally the office jerk; I think it’s just the face he shows the world, and he was complaining about his home life, his wife and his kids,”

“Well, it’s nice to hear that people care about you, dear. Have a good evening,”

“Good night, Pat,”

Patricia arrived home, and as it was cold, she lit the fireplace, and the house was slowly filled with the pleasant aroma of burning pine. She then busied herself with dinner. Tonight, she thought, it would be chicken dumpling stew; a straightforward recipe should be good enough, and I would just prefer the taste of tender, thoroughly cooked chicken. With these thoughts, she gathered all ingredients on the counter: the chicken, the sage, the basil, pepper, vegetables, and started cooking. She could never entirely get over the death of her son, even if it had happened a month previously; he will always be her son, even if he’s six feet under. Her eyes were already watering from cutting up the onions, but emotional tears shortly joined these. How she wished Jimmy were still alive and smiling! Now there was simply a headstone in a cemetery somewhere as a public memento to his life. If only he had taken better care of himself. She had been less-than-caring when it came to food; she would often send him to school with money to buy whatever in the cafeteria or at a local fast-food place rather than make him a sandwich. Had she made him a sandwich or a wrap more often, or perhaps some soup, then he would not have developed a taste for alluring foods that were not healthful, such as poutine. She was fretting over her parenting skills in the years gone by when Ryan opened the door, just having come home from his work at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.


Ryan, in his job as a host for the local morning program, was thinking of politics, just as seemingly everyone else in the office was doing given the recent election call, and the story of the day was not strictly related to the campaigning, but was a distraction of sorts: the Prime Minister’s wife, Cathaline, had suffered a nervous breakdown, and the newspapers, in an uncharacteristic and unfortunate episode of gossip-mongering, were all agog with this latest piece of news, and the political gossip columns were filled with speculation going both ways with regards to her sanity. Meach was not pleased, as he had channelled Shakespeare in a rare bit of linguistic sophistication, something for which he was not known: “She should have died hereafter; there would have been a time for such a word.” Meach had been referring, of course, to the fact that the newspapers had bothered to devote a few columns of gossip to Cathaline Gutzmann-Meach’s breakdown, and Meach was evidently wishing to stand away from the prying glare of the media. At any rate, it distracted from the election campaign. Ryan walked home in the cold, dark night, wondering why an election was necessary in the winter. Further to the point, why was an election necessary at all? They had just had an election the previous October, and that had essentially maintained the status quo; he saw no reason why the outcome of this election should be any different. After the bus ride, his house looked welcoming, with the twinkling blue Christmas lights without, strung along the eaves, and the cozy warmth within that so many associated with good housekeeping.
As he opened the door, a draught of air came in and disturbed the picture of James and Clarissa smiling together in Newfoundland. They had displayed it on the mantel, in front of a delicate ceramic goose. It fell, and floated into the fireplace. Ryan didn’t notice this, so the photo burned, first blackening James’s face, and then Clarissa’s. Neither of them noticed until after dinner, when Ryan went into the living room and noticed that the picture, which had been his favourite, was not there.

“Patty, what happened to that picture of Jim and Clarie in the restaurant? It’s not here,”

Patricia, who had retired to the living room and picked up a novel (Agatha Christie’s N or M?), looked at the mantel and said, “I don’t know. It was there when last I looked.” The truth was that the last time she had looked had been over a month previously, just after the funeral, and in the clutter that accumulates over time, one tends to lose track of things, and must make a list or otherwise keep a sharp mind to notice something. It was like the way that a tree’s shade is taken for granted by some until it is cut down.

The two puzzled over the missing photograph, and pondered over where it could be, but to no avail: what was once a photograph of James and Clarissa in a restaurant was now ash, destined to be scraped out of the fireplace the next day. They both hoped that it would turn up and it would happen that it had simply floated under a chair or beneath the carpet by some stroke of luck, rather than the fireplace, which was actually the case. It was fortunate that there was more than one copy of the photos, but not for the older Millers; they were ignorant of the copies Margaret and Hyram had, as well as of the copies Clarissa had.


On that same evening, Belinda was on the train, travelling to visit her mother. The plan for the trip would be similar to the one she would make at Christmas: she would arrive at Union Station, and ride the subway to Old Mill Station, where her mother would be waiting for her. It would have been simple, but she had actually intended to make the trip earlier; she had been tired, missed the earlier train, and instead of arriving at Union Station at nine, her actual arrival time would be closer to midnight, and that was thanks to much wrangling by her with the ticket inspector at the station; otherwise, she would have been arriving in Toronto the following morning.

Previous Next