As Ella and Gregory stood side by side near the metal railing that separated them from the great chasm, they stared straight ahead, the sun casting its first rays on the mind-boggling void and rendering them speechless. That wasn’t much of an accomplishment for Gregory, since silence was the state in which he spent much of his days, but it was a shocking new experience for Ella. For close to ten minutes she gazed ahead as if stunned by the vista.
Almost frightened by her reaction, Gregory put his arm around her shoulder. “You okay there?” he asked with a slight but benevolent smile.
Tears welled in Ella’s large black eyes, which were almost as dark as her hair. There were no tears in her eyes on the first night they had made love in his small, sparsely furnished apartment three weeks after they met. Nor were there any tears when he proposed to her a year later, and most surprisingly, even on their wedding day. Gregory used to think all women cried at weddings, especially their own, but Ella proved that theory wrong. It took a geological freak of nature to bring tears to his wife’s eyes.
“This is it,” Ella said finally. “This is where I want to be buried.”
“Honey, I don’t think that’s legal.”
“I don’t mean literally,” she said, giving him a slight, scolding push with her shoulder against his rib cage. “God, sometimes you can be so damn literal. I meant my ashes, my remains.”
Remains? Gregory repeated to himself. He hated that word. It sounded like something a serial killer left behind. Gregory turned away from the scenic wonder and peered into Ella’s watery eyes, so open and already familiar to him as though he had known them all his life. “That’s a pretty morbid request on your honeymoon, isn’t it?”
“It feels like home,” she said as undramatically as if she were talking about her favourite sweater. “Puts it all into perspective, doesn’t it?”
“How so?” he asked, instantly regretting the question. He often felt like a complete ignoramus around her. She was always thinking five steps ahead of him.
“Oh, I don’t know — life, death, divorce, bankruptcy, a bad case of syphilis, a flooded basement, all of it. This —”she pointed with her chin “— dwarfs everything else. What’s a single life’s ups and downs in the face of billion-year-old rocks?”
After that they sank back into their respective reveries as the sun slowly revealed more and more of the red cliffs and pits of the canyon.
“It’s amazing isn’t it, God’s patience?” she said without looking at him.
Ever the scientist, Gregory wanted to say, “What’s God got to do with it?” But he remained silent as they held hands and stared ahead.
———
“She wanted to be cremated and scattered over Grand Canyon,” Gregory says to the undertaker couple. Then he grins devilishly. “Me, I want to be buried, mud, dirt, and all. Why deny the crawly suckers their feast? That’s my philosophy.”
A quick peal of laughter escapes the woman and stops immediately as though she remembered that merriment in the presence of a grieving widower goes against everything they taught her at mortuary school.
Finally, after saying goodbye to the couple, Gregory steps out of the funeral home and into the blinding September sun, feeling relieved. It is mid-afternoon, and Danforth Avenue is alive with people going about their business. A young mother with a pierced eyebrow pushes a double stroller. A willowy black teenager, possibly Haitian, almost bumps into Gregory. He notices the teen is reading a tattered copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. An old Greek woman in a black skirt, a black sweater, and a black head scarf sits on a bench, hands folded, gazing intently at something unseen as though trying to figure out how she got there.
Gregory takes a couple of deep breaths as he walks toward his car, which he parked in a lot a block away. He is so happy to be out at last and into the sunlight. What sweet lark it is, he thinks, to find one’s self plunged deep in the midst of life. A sudden pang of guilt hits him. How heartless, he thinks, to revel in life, to breathe it so shamelessly, so joyously.
Andrew would rather be at home making Hanna laugh by doing funny faces. It astonishes him how much pleasure can be had by this simple activity. And pleasure is something he is in dire need of right now, considering that his mother is lying in a funeral home being embalmed, powdered, and lip-glossed in a feeble attempt to make her not look as dead as she is. At the moment he is in his taxi parked on Elizabeth Street outside Toronto General Hospital where he often waits to pick up customers. Thanks to his father’s bowling alley freak-out, he had to charge $3,000 on his Visa and now has to work extra hours to pay it off.
He is listening to Joni Mitchell oldies. Joni’s and Nina Simone’s music are all he plays while working. Something about their voices adds a little zip to his days. As he shifts in the fake leather seat of his cab, he thinks about Helli for the first time in weeks. Maybe the orange dusk sky over the city’s office towers reminds him of her. Sunset was her favourite time. Or perhaps the recent events in his life have made him think of her. He can’t help wondering what his life would be like if he hadn’t left Helsinki because of his mother’s illness.
His old life with Helli seems like paradise now. But what he really longs for isn’t so much Helli but her cozy, warm apartment in which they spent most of their free time cooking, reading, and making love. And then there were their weekend getaways to her parents’ lake cottage two hours southeast of Helsinki. Everything he left behind beckons him now. Andrew forces himself to stop his futile pondering and redirects his thoughts back to Hanna. Only she has the power to make him feel he is where he needs to be. Because of her he is still intact. Because of her he is well on his way to mastering the one thing most of people have trouble learning — how to be where they are.
He glances at the car clock. It reads 6:46 p.m. He wonders what his daughter is doing. Knowing her schedule as well as he does, he figures she has just awakened from her nap and is being fed dinner, spitting everything out and driving her mother crazy in the process. He smiles to himself as he pictures the sweet chaos play before him like a silent movie.
Andrew takes his cellphone from the side pocket of his denim cargo pants and speed-dials home but hangs up before making a connection. Since Hanna isn’t going to pick up, it means he would have to speak to his wife and ask her to put the phone near Hanna’s mouth. Normally, he has no objection to talking to his wife, but he can imagine the mood she is in now as she struggles to feed their baby after a long day of teaching kids who are referred to as “special needs.” This is the time of day when he tries his best to stay out of Rosemary’s way. He does the same early in the morning when she gets ready for work. The weekends are usually okay unless something unexpected happens or she returns from one of her biweekly visits to her mother, who lives in London, Ontario.
Just as Andrew puts the phone back into his pocket, a Middle Eastern woman with a mass of unruly curly hair covering much of her face approaches his window. “Can you take me to Islington and Dundas West, please?” she asks, pulling as many curls away from her face as she can.
“Hop in,” Andrew says, starting the engine.
As the woman climbs into the back of the taxi, he sets the meter. The rush-hour traffic is beginning to ease in the downtown core but is still heavy enough to require him to take some creative alternative routes. Most cabbies gladly sit in traffic even