The Fields of Grief

‘She was a lot more than that, Kelly.’

‘I know, but all you had to go through! Looking after me – raising a little kid practically by yourself. And all the stuff you put up with from her. I remember one time – back when we were living in Toronto – you’d been building this really complicated cabinet, full of drawers and little doors. I think you’d been working on it for like a year or something, and one day you come home and she’s smashed it to pieces so she could burn it! She was on some trip about fire and creative destruction and some manic rap that made no sense at all, and she destroyed this thing you were creating with such devotion. How do you forgive something like that?’

Cardinal was silent for a time. Finally he turned to look at his daughter. ‘Catherine never did anything I didn’t forgive.’

‘That’s because of who you are, not because of what she was. How could she not realize how lucky she was? How could she just throw it all away?’

Kelly was crying now. Cardinal touched her shoulder and she leaned against him, hot tears soaking through his shirt the way her mother’s had so often done.

‘She was in pain,’ Cardinal said. ‘She was suffering in a way no one could reach. That’s what you have to remember. Difficult as she could be sometimes to live with, she’s the one who suffered the most. No one hated her disease more than she did.

‘And if you think she wasn’t grateful to be loved, you’re wrong, Kelly. If there was one phrase she used more than any other, it was “I’m so lucky.” She said it all the time. We’d just be having dinner or something and she’d touch my hand and say, “I’m so lucky.” She used to say it about you, too. She felt terrible that she missed so much of your growing up. She did everything she could to fight this disease and in the end it just beat her, that’s all. Your mother had tremendous courage – and loyalty – to last as long as she did.’

‘God,’ Kelly said. She sounded like she had a cold now, nose all stuffed up. ‘I wish I was half as compassionate as you. Now I’ve gone and ruined your shirt.’

‘I wasn’t going to wear this one anyway.’

He handed her a box of Kleenex and she plucked out a handful.

‘I gotta go wash my face,’ she said. ‘I look like Medea.’

Cardinal wasn’t sure who Medea was. Nor was he at all sure about the comforting things he had just told his daughter. What do I know about anything? he thought. I didn’t even see this coming. I’m worse than the mayor. Nearly thirty years together, and I don’t see that the woman I love is on the verge of killing herself?

Prompted by that very question, Cardinal had the previous day driven into town to talk to Catherine’s psychiatrist.

He had met Frederick Bell a couple of times during Catherine’s last stay in hospital. They had not talked long enough for Cardinal to form much more than an impression of intelligence and competence. But Catherine had been delighted to discover him because, unlike most psychiatrists, Bell was a talk therapist as well as a prescriber of drugs. He was also a specialist in depression who had written books on the subject.

His office was in his house, an Edwardian monstrosity of red brick located on Randall Street, just behind the cathedral. Previous owners included a member of parliament and a man who went on to become a minor media baron. With its turrets and gingerbread, not to mention its elaborate garden and wrought-iron fence, the house dominated the neighbourhood.

Cardinal was met at the door by Mrs Bell, a friendly woman in her fifties, who was on her way out. When Cardinal introduced himself, she said, ‘Oh, Detective Cardinal, I’m so sorry for your loss.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re not here in any official capacity, are you?’

‘No, no. My wife was a patient of your husband’s and –’

‘Of course, of course. You’re bound to have questions.’

She went off to find her husband, and Cardinal looked around at his surroundings. Polished hardwood, oak panelling and mouldings – and that was just the waiting area. He was about to sit down in one of a row of chairs when a door swung open and Dr Bell was there, bigger than Cardinal remembered him, well over six feet, with a curly brown beard, grey at the jaw line, and a pleasant English accent that Cardinal knew was neither extremely posh nor working class.

He took Cardinal’s hand in both of his and shook it. ‘Detective Cardinal, let me say again, I’m so terribly sorry about Catherine. You have my deepest, deepest sympathy. Come in, come in.’

Except for a vast desk and the lack of a television, they might have been in someone’s living room. Bookshelves, crammed to the ceiling with medical and psychology texts, journals and binders, covered all four walls. Plump leather chairs, battered and far from matching, were set at conversational angles. And of course, there was a couch – a comfortable, home-style sofa, not the severe, geometric kind you saw in movies featuring psychiatrists.

At the doctor’s urging, Cardinal took a seat on the couch.

‘Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Tea?’

‘Thanks, I’m fine. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.’

‘Oh, no. It’s the least I can do,’ Dr Bell said. He hitched his corduroy trousers before sitting in one of the leather chairs. He was wearing an Irish wool sweater and didn’t look at all like a medical man. A college professor, Cardinal thought, or perhaps a violinist.

‘I imagine you’re asking yourself how it is you didn’t see this coming,’ Bell said, expressing exactly what had been running through Cardinal’s mind.

‘Yes,’ Cardinal said. ‘That pretty much sums it up.’

‘You’re not alone. Here I am, someone with whom Catherine has been discussing her emotional life in detail for nearly a year, and I didn’t see it coming.’

He sat back and shook his woolly head. Cardinal was reminded of an Airedale. After a moment the doctor said softly, ‘Obviously, I would have admitted her if I had.’

‘But isn’t it unusual?’ Cardinal said. ‘To have a patient who keeps coming to see you, but doesn’t mention that she’s planning to … Why would anyone continue seeing a therapist they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, confide in?’

‘She did confide in me. Catherine was no stranger to suicidal thoughts. Now don’t get me wrong, she gave no indication of any imminent plan. But certainly we discussed her feelings about suicide. Part of her was horrified by the idea, part of her found it very attractive – as I’m sure you know.’

Cardinal nodded. ‘It’s one of the first things she told me about herself, before we were married.’

‘Honesty was one of Catherine’s strengths,’ Bell said. ‘She often said she would rather die than go through another major depression – and not just to spare herself, I hasten to add. Like most people who suffer from depression, she hated the fact that it made life so difficult for people she loved. I’d be surprised if she hadn’t expressed this to you over the years.’

‘Many times,’ Cardinal said, and felt something collapse inside him. The room went blurry, and the doctor handed him a box of Kleenex.

After a few moments, Dr Bell knit his brows and leaned forward in his chair. ‘You couldn’t have done anything, you know. Please let me set your mind at rest on that point. It’s quite common for people who commit suicide to give no sign of their intention.’

‘I know. She wasn’t giving away objects that were precious to her or anything like that.’

‘No. None of the classic signs. Nor is there a previous attempt in her medical records, although there is plenty of suicidal ideation. But what we do have is an ongoing, decades-long battle with clinical depression, part of her bipolar disorder. The statistics are indisputable: people who suffer from manic depression are the most likely to kill themselves, bar none. There is no other group of people more likely. God, I almost sound like I know what I’m talking about, don’t I?’ Dr Bell held his hands up in a gesture of helplessness. ‘Something like this, well, it makes you feel pretty incompetent.’

‘I’m sure it’s not your fault,’ Cardinal said. He didn’t know what he was doing here. Had he really come to listen to this rumpled Englishman talk about statistics and probabilities? Clearly, I’m the one who sees her every day, he thought. I’m the one who’s known her longest. I’m the one who didn’t pay attention. Too stupid, too selfish, too blind.

‘It’s tempting to blame yourself, isn’t it?’ Bell said, once again reading his thoughts.

‘Merely factual in my case,’ Cardinal said, and could not miss the bitterness in his own voice.

‘But I’m doing the same thing,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s the collateral damage of suicide. Anyone close to someone who commits suicide is going to feel they didn’t do enough, they weren’t sensitive enough, they should have intervened. But that doesn’t mean those feelings are accurate assessments of reality.’

The doctor said some other things that Cardinal seemed to miss. His mind was a burned-out building. A shell. How could he expect to know what was going on around him at any given moment?

As Cardinal was leaving, Bell said, ‘Catherine was fortunate to be married to you. And she knew it.’

The doctor’s words threatened to undo him all over again. He just managed to hold himself together, like a patient fresh off the operating table clutching together his stitched halves. Somehow he blundered his way out through the waiting room and into the gold autumn light.

5

Desmond’s Funeral Home is centrally located at the corner of Sumner and Earl streets, which pretty much means anyone coming in or out of town has to drive past it, turning it into a daily memento mori for the citizens of Algonquin Bay. It’s not a pretty building, little more than a cement-block rhomboid, painted a cream colour to soften the severity of its outlines and lighten the darkness of its implications. Whenever Cardinal’s father had driven by, he would always wave and yell, ‘You haven’t got me yet, Mr Desmond! You haven’t got me yet!’

But of course Mr Desmond had got Stan Cardinal in the end, just as he had got Cardinal’s mother before him and would get every other resident of Algonquin Bay. The Catholics, anyway. There was another funeral home a few blocks east that got the Protestants, and still another, newer establishment that seemed to be doing a brisk business with recently deceased Jews, Muslims, and ‘others’.

Mr Desmond was not in fact one man but a many-personned entity whose sad but necessary tasks were vigorously carried out by numerous Desmond sons, daughters and in-laws.

As Cardinal stepped through the funeral home entrance with Kelly, thick clouds of emotion gathered in his chest. His knees began to tremble. David Desmond, a neat young man married to precision, shook hands with them. He wore a trim grey suit with just the right rectangle of perfectly starched handkerchief showing above the breast pocket. His shoes were gleaming black brogues more suited to an older man.

‘You have forty-three minutes before people start arriving,’ he said. ‘Would you like to go in now?’

Cardinal nodded.

‘All right. You’re in the Rose Room just over that way, the second pair of oak doors on the right, just past the highboy with the head-and-shoulders clock.’ The directions were delivered as if they were embarking on a journey of some miles instead of thirty feet of pastel carpet. In any case Mr Desmond Jr escorted them, and slid open the doors.

‘Please go right in,’ he said. ‘I’ll be here if you need anything.’

Cardinal had been in this room before and knew what to expect: walls a soothing dusty pink, matching couches and armchairs, tasteful end tables dominated by gauzy lamps that bathed everything in diffuse, benevolent light. But when he stepped through the doorway he stopped, emitting one syllable – actually a sigh, a sudden expulsion of breath not intended as speech.

‘What is it?’ Kelly said from behind him. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘I asked for a closed casket,’ Cardinal managed to say. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see her again.’

‘Uh, no. Me either.’

The two of them stood just inside the doorway. The room stretched into a rose-coloured tunnel, at the other end of which Catherine, impossibly beautiful, lay waiting.

Finally Kelly said, ‘Do you want me to ask them to close it?’

Cardinal didn’t answer. He crossed the room with slow, tentative steps, as if the floor might give way at any moment.

Years previously, when Cardinal’s mother had been laid out in this same room, the figure in the coffin had scarcely resembled her. The disease that had consumed her had left no vestige of the chirpy, strong-willed woman who had loved him all his life. And his father too, minus his glasses and his combative manner, might have been a complete stranger.

But Catherine was Catherine: the wide brow, the full mouth with its tiny parentheses, the brown hair curling gracefully to her shoulders. How the Desmonds had repaired the damage inflicted by the fall, Cardinal didn’t want to know. The left cheekbone had been completely smashed, but now here was his wife, face whole, cheekbones intact.

The sight yanked him into yet another dimension of pain. Pain was not a big enough word for this country of agony, this Yukon of grief.

A bend in time, and he was huddled on one of the pink couches, exhausted and sighing. Kelly was beside him, clutching a soggy ball of Kleenex.

Someone was speaking to him. Cardinal rose unsteadily and shook hands with Mr and Mrs Walcott, neighbours on Madonna Road. They were retired schoolteachers who spent most of their time bickering. Today they had apparently agreed to a ceasefire and presented a united front that was formal and subdued.

‘Very sorry for your loss,’ Mr Walcott said.

Mrs Walcott took a nimble step forward. ‘Such a tragedy,’ she said. ‘At such a lovely time of year, too.’

‘Yes,’ Cardinal said. ‘Autumn was always Catherine’s favourite season.’

‘Did you get the casserole all right?’

Cardinal looked at Kelly, who nodded.

‘Yes, thank you. It’s very kind of you.’

‘You just have to reheat it. Twenty minutes at two-fifty ought to do it.’

Others were arriving. One at a time they went to stand by the coffin, some kneeling and crossing themselves. There were teachers from Northern University and the community college where Catherine had taught. Former students. There was white-haired Mr Fisk, for decades the proprietor of Fisk’s Camera Shop until it was put out of business, like half of Main Street, by the deadly munificence of Wal-Mart.

‘That’s a great picture of Catherine, with the cameras,’ Mr Fisk said. ‘She used to come into the store looking just like that. Always she’d be wearing that anorak or the fishing vest. Remember that fishing vest?’ Nervousness was manifesting itself in Mr Fisk as jauntiness, as if they were discussing an eccentric friend who had moved away.

‘Nice turnout,’ he added, looking around with approval.

Catherine’s students, middle-aged some of them, others young and teary-eyed, murmured kind words at Cardinal. No matter how conventional, they pierced Cardinal in a way that surprised him. Who would have thought mere words could be so powerful?

His colleagues showed up: McLeod in a suit that had been cut for a smaller man, Collingwood and Arsenault looking like an out-of-work comedy duo. Larry Burke made the sign of the cross in front of the coffin and stood before it with head bowed for some time. He didn’t know Cardinal all that well – he was new to the detective squad – but he came over and said how sorry he was.

Delorme showed up in a dark blue dress. Cardinal couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her in a dress.

‘Such a sad day,’ she said, hugging him. He could feel her trembling slightly, fighting tears of sympathy, and he couldn’t speak. She knelt before the coffin for a few minutes, and then came back to give Cardinal another hug, her eyes wet.

Police Chief R.J. Kendall came, along with Detective Sergeant Chouinard, Ken Szelagy – everyone from CID – and various patrol constables.

Another bend in the afternoon, and now they were at Highlawn Crematorium. Cardinal had no memory of the drive out into the hills. It had been Catherine’s request that there be no church service, but in the will she and Cardinal had had drawn up, she had asked that Father Samson Mkembe say a few words.

When Cardinal had been an altar boy, all of the priests had been of Irish descent, or French Canadian. But now the church had to recruit from farther afield, and Father Mkembe had come all the way from Sierra Leone. He stood at the front of the crematory chapel, a tall, bony man with a face of high-gloss ebony.

The chapel was almost full. Cardinal saw Meredith Moore, head of the art department up at the college, and Sally Westlake, a close friend of Catherine’s. And he could make out among the mourners the woolly head of Dr Bell.

Father Mkembe talked about Catherine’s strength. Indeed, he got most of her good qualities right – no doubt because he had phoned earlier asking Kelly for tips. But he spoke also about how Catherine’s faith had sustained her in adversity – a patent falsehood, as Catherine only went to church for the big occasions and had long ago stopped believing in God.

The furnace doors opened and the flames flared for an instant. The coffin rolled in, the doors closed, and the priest said a final prayer. A doomsday bell was tolling in Cardinal’s heart: You failed her.

The colours of the world outside were unnaturally bright. The sky was the blue of a gas flame, and the carpet of autumn leaves seemed to emit light, not just reflect it – golds and yellows and rusty reds. A shadow passed over Cardinal as the smoke that had been his wife dimmed the sun.

‘Mr Cardinal, I don’t know if you remember me …’

Meredith Moore was shaking Cardinal’s hand in her dry little palm. She was a wisp of a woman, so dehydrated she looked as if she should be dropped in water to expand to her natural size.

‘Catherine and I were colleagues …’

‘Yes, Mrs Moore. We’ve met a few times over the years.’ In fact, Mrs Moore had fought a nasty battle with Catherine over control of the art department. She had not been shy about raising Catherine’s psychiatric history as an impediment, and in the end she had prevailed.

‘Catherine will be sorely missed,’ she said, adding, ‘The students are so fond of her,’ in a tone that implied the complete bankruptcy of student opinion.

Cardinal left her to find Kelly, who was being hugged by Sally Westlake. Sally was an outsized woman with an outsized heart and one of the few people Cardinal had called personally about Catherine’s death.

‘Oh, John,’ she said, dabbing her eyes. ‘I’m going to miss her so much. She was my best friend. My inspiration. That’s not just a cliché: she was always challenging me to think more about my photographs, to shoot more, to spend more time in the darkroom. She was just the best. And she was so proud of you,’ she said to Kelly.

‘I don’t see why,’ Kelly said.

‘Because you’re just like her, talented and brave. Pursuing a career in art in New York? Takes guts, my dear.’

‘On the other hand, it could be a complete waste of time.’

‘Oh, don’t say that!’ For a moment, Cardinal thought Sally was going to pinch his daughter’s cheek or ruffle her hair.

Dr Bell came up to give his condolences once more.

‘It’s kind of you to come,’ Cardinal said. ‘This is my daughter, Kelly. She’s just up from New York for a few days. Dr Bell was Catherine’s psychiatrist.’

Kelly gave a rueful smile. ‘Not one of your success stories, I guess.’

‘Kelly …’

‘No, no, that’s all right. Perfectly legitimate. Unfortunately, specializing in depression is a bit like being an oncologist – a low success rate is to be expected. But I didn’t want to disturb you, I just wanted to pay my respects.’

When he was gone, Kelly turned to her father. ‘You said Mom didn’t seem particularly depressed.’

‘I know. But she’s fooled me before.’

‘Everyone’s being so kind,’ Kelly said when they were back home. Troops of sympathy cards stood in formation across the dining-room table, and in the kitchen, the counter and table were heaped with Tupperware containers of casseroles, risottos, ratatouilles, meatloaves, tarts and tourtières, even a baked ham.

‘A nice tradition, this food thing,’ Cardinal said. ‘You start to feel all hollow and you know you must be hungry, but the thought of cooking is just too much. The thought of anything’s too much.’

‘Why don’t you go and lie down?’ Kelly said, taking off her coat.

‘No, I’d only feel worse. I’m going to put something in the microwave.’ He picked up a plastic container and stood contemplating it in the middle of the kitchen as if it were a device from the neighbourhood of Arcturus.

‘Even more cards,’ Kelly said, dropping a fistful on the kitchen table.

‘Why don’t you open them?’

Cardinal put the container in the microwave and faced the rows of buttons. Another hiatus. The simplest tasks were beyond him; Catherine was gone. What was the point of food? Of sleep? Of life? You won’t survive, an inner voice told him. You’ve had it.

‘Oh, my God,’ Kelly said.

‘What?’

She was clutching a card in one hand and covering her mouth with the other.

‘What is it?’ Cardinal said. ‘Let me see.’

Kelly shook her head and pulled the card away.

‘Kelly, let me see that.’

He took hold of her wrist and plucked the card from her hand.

‘Just throw it out, Dad. Don’t even look at it. Just throw it away.’

The card was an expensive one, with a still life of a lily on it. Inside, the standard message of condolence had been covered by a small rectangle of paper, on which someone had typed: How does it feel, asshole? Just no telling how things will turn out, is there?

6

The planet Grief. An incalculable number of light years from the warmth of the sun. When the rain falls, it falls in droplets of grief, and when the light shines, it is in waves and particles of grief. From whatever direction the wind blows – south, east, north, or west – it blows cinders of grief before it. Grief stings your eyes and sucks the breath from your lungs. No oxygen on this planet, no nitrogen; the atmosphere is composed entirely of grief.

Grief came at Cardinal not just from the myriad objects that had been Catherine’s: photographs, CDs, books, clothes, refrigerator magnets, the furniture she had chosen, the walls she had painted, the plants she had tended. Grief squeezed its way through the seams of the house, under the doors and around the windows.

He couldn’t sleep. The note repeated itself over and over in his head. He got up from his bed and studied it under the bright lights of the kitchen. Kelly had thrown out the envelope, but he retrieved it from the trash. The type was clearly the work of a computer printer, but there was nothing distinctive about it – at least, nothing he could detect with the naked eye.

Nor was there anything remarkable about the card itself. A Hallmark sympathy card and envelope was available at any drug or stationery store across the country.

The postmark showed the date and time – that would be the date and time it was processed, of course, not the date and time of mailing – and the postal code. That code, Cardinal knew, did not indicate the exact location of mailing, but the location of the processing plant where the card was handled. Cardinal recognized the postmark as Mattawa’s. He knew a few people who lived in Mattawa, acquaintances who could have no possible reason to hurt him. Of course, Mattawa was prime cottage country, lots of people went there from all over Ontario for weekends by the river. But it was well into October, and most people had closed their cottages for the winter.