After Helen
PAUL CAVANAGH
After Helen
© 2006, 2014 by Paul Cavanagh. All rights reserved.
Published by Not That London Publisher, 2014
Published in eBook format by Not That London Publisher
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
Lyrics from “Northwest Passage” by Stan Rogers, Fogarty’s Cove Music, © 1980 Reprinted with kind permission.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cavanagh, Paul, 1962-
After Helen / Paul Cavanagh. — 2nd ed.
Originally published: Toronto : HarperCollins, © 2006
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-9938093-0-9 (pbk.).
ISBN 978-0-9938093-1-6 (html)
I.Title.
| PS8605.A918A64 2014 | C813'.6 | C2014-904486-0 |
C2014-904487-9
Set in Dante
Cover photo by Nanduu / photocase.com
Cover design by Tania Craan
to Amy,
to Dad,
as well as to all those in search of
a passage of their own
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line through a land so wide and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
—Stan Rogers
Chapter 1
I began teaching again one week after Helen died. The principal at my school, Abbie Sullivan, was willing to let me stay out longer. I still had to be in shock, she insisted. No point in forcing things. Of course, her real worry was that I’d melt down before the end of my first class and irradiate the kids with unresolved grief. She was picturing herself scrambling to contain the fallout, the calls from parents. I could tell. But I was resolute. My first class proceeded without incident. Then the next. And the next. After a while, Abbie stopped “accidentally” bumping into me in the corridors and assessing my responses to her forced casual remarks. Not that she seemed relieved. Actually, I sensed her wariness hardening into disappointment—or was it disapproval?—as if she somehow believed that by getting on with my life, I was declaring Helen easy to forget.
If she only knew.
Few people at school had known Helen other than by reputation. To them, she was my miscast wife: six feet tall to my five-foot-eight; smouldering red hair to my receding charcoal; faded freckles to my indelible crow’s feet. More rumoured than seen. She was the woman who had once charmed a reluctant Farley Mowat into delivering a soliloquy on Canada’s North to my grade ten history class. The woman who had parked her car in the foyer of the big-box outlet that had put the bookshop she’d inherited from her father out of business. This was the Helen I tried to remember, the indomitable, larger-than-life version. Helen before her cherished red locks fell out in clumps, before she shrunk in on herself, her world collapsing into a small sphere of pain and nausea.
Teaching’s a relief for me. It forces me to live in the present. There’s no way I can teach anything of consequence to a room full of fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds without being fully alert to their shifting hormonal moods and adapting my lesson plans on the fly. No time for reliving those last days in the hospital, when Helen’s body was so ravaged by cancer that she was barely recognizable. The classroom is my refuge. Home is where the past swallows me, where reminders of her absence—the closet full of clothes I can’t bring myself to give away; the half-used tube of toothpaste in the medicine cabinet; the renegade strands of hair that keep appearing in the dustpan—lie in wait.
And then there’s Severn, the most undeniable reminder of them all. Even last night, when she sullenly avoided my gaze at the dinner table, I saw afterimages of Helen in her. It wasn’t so much the facial resemblance any more—the upturned nose, the lips so quick to pout. “Why are you staring at me like that?” she complained, as if a man wasn’t supposed to look at his own daughter. But of course, it wasn’t only her I was staring at. She’d just picked the heart out of a slice of bread and left the crust, exactly as Helen used to do.
With other people’s children, I’ve learned how to see past their affected indifference and catch glimpses of their inner clockwork. From there, it’s just a matter of gently jiggling the right springs and letting their potential unwind. With each year that passes, I quietly appreciate my handiwork when one or two dark-horse students of mine go on to surprise their critics in the teachers’ lounge. It’s easy when your stake in a child is professional and not personal, when you see your protégés for only an hour each day. With Severn, I have no such luxury. Like any father and daughter, we know how to push each other’s buttons, and frequently do—more so now that it’s just the two of us. My powers of gentle persuasion are useless with her.
Last night we were eating late because she hadn’t got home until nearly eight—no call to let me know where she was, no apology once she walked in the door. It had become a regular occurrence, so much so that I’d given up chewing her out and generally started eating without her. Yesterday I’d waited for her, though.
“Where were you this afternoon?” I asked her as she poked at the egg noodles on her plate.
The response was predictable. She rolled her eyes, not even bothering to answer. Clearly my question was an invasion of her privacy. Why did I have to know where she was every second of the day? A week earlier, I might have backed off, chided myself for not trusting her more.
“Were you with Avery?” I asked.
Now I’d done it. I’d crossed the line. She shoved her chair back from the table. Its feet scraped across the hardwood floor, an effect designed to irritate me, I knew.
“I’m not hungry any more,” she declared to the kitchen table and tromped off, leaving the overcooked fish I’d prepared for her.
I forced myself to finish what was on my plate, even though the knots in my stomach had cinched my appetite. The green beans squeaked between my teeth. The empty chair where Helen used to sit stared back at me. Severn resented the pretense of the family meal. She thought that I was trying to teach her a hackneyed lesson about how life goes on by cooking her pale imitations of Helen’s meals. To her, I was the two-headed impostor, the father who wears an apron and pretends to be her mother.
I shovelled Severn’s leftovers into a Tupperware container. Then I heard the front door thump shut. She’d gone again, probably to see Avery.
* * *
I have my grade ten students write me a short essay near the beginning of the year. I know that most of them look on history as a collection of boring things that happened to dead strangers in the dull and uninteresting reaches