I was running along the Upper Blandford Road this morning, watching the little islands emerge from the morning mist, when I came upon a fisherman stacking lobster traps by his shed.
“Running like the dogs of hell are behind ya!” he remarked with a smile and a salute. I laughed, waved back, thinking, You have no idea.
I spent much of my early life on the run, in one way or another. I escape to this place on Nova Scotia’s Mahone Bay when I can and hunker down in my old trailer. I take reassurance from the enduring beauty of sea and sky, the sunsets across the bay that
soothe me. And I sift through memories I had so firmly put away for so long.
The cast of my story revisits me in this quiet place: my mother, my father, and Stan. All gone now. I have learned to remember them without the heat of anger or the searing sting of betrayal.
In this retreat I am surrounded by the physical evidence of my mother’s life. The wooden table and chairs from her kitchen. Her spice rack, the earth-toned spices painstakingly chosen. I can sense the pleasure she took in the careful printing of the handwritten labels, the alphabetical ordering of the round glass bottles. I think that organizing and ordering, the imposing of a predictable architecture, was a response to how little control she felt over so much else. Her dishes are in the cupboard over the sink; we bought them in Winnipeg after renovating the kitchen. Her cookbook is on the shelf above the fridge. Her belongings, what I chose to keep of them, have furnished this place where I so often find myself reflecting on the life we lived and, now, wrestling its strange narrative into submission and meaning. I bring them all back in my mind and on the screen before me.
My mother often said I should be a writer. And then she gave me a story — our story — the story I was warned never to tell.
* * *
It was dusk, late February of 1988. The air was cold and clear as I stepped out of my car in the parking lot of the highway gas station. A crescent moon to the southwest was perfectly outlined in the darkening sky. At its tip winked a bright, large star, perhaps a planet. The horizon still glowed a deep magenta. My mother’s aging blue Toyota Tercel was parked nearby, under a light. We’d agreed to meet here, in the small farming community of Sussex, New Brunswick. She would drive from Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she was doing her theology degree, and I would drive from Saint John, New Brunswick, where I was working as a reporter at the local newspaper, the Telegraph-Journal.
As I approached our rendezvous, I saw the lights of a motel just off the highway, a few hundred metres from the gas station. I’d driven by the large, lit-up block letters of the Bluebird Motel many times.
I walked over to Mom’s car and got in, said hello, leaning across for a hug. She held me just a beat longer, tighter than normal. As she pulled back, her smile was sad, almost apologetic. She handed me a note and an empty envelope. She put one finger over her lips, hushing me, although I wasn’t speaking. She pointed at the note. Puzzled, I unfolded it and read, in her distinctive handwriting: “Don’t say anything. Take all your jewellery off and put it in the envelope. Don’t talk until we get out of the car again. I will explain.”
I sat staring at the note. I could hear my pulse as silence descended between us like a wall. My mother suddenly felt like a stranger whose intentions were unclear. Why this bizarre drama? I looked at her for a long moment, then slowly took off my rings. The small diamond cluster my father had given me for my 16th birthday. A square-cut peridot, my birthstone, that was a Christmas present from his third wife, Thora. I pulled the long, heavy chain that held an antique-style watch out of my shirt front and over my head. A gift from Mom the Christmas I was 15. It all went into the envelope. I passed it to her. She licked the flap, sealed the envelope, and set it on the console between our seats. As she put the car into gear and eased onto the now-darkening winter road, I braced myself for what was to come. We drove the short distance in silence.
Earlier that week, Mom had called me at work. We usually talked in the evening, but I was glad to hear from her. She’d moved to Halifax the previous year to go back to school and I missed her and our day-over debriefs.
“Can you talk for a minute?” she’d asked.
“Sure,” I answered. “I have an interview, but I don’t have to leave for 20 minutes.”
Around me the newsroom of the Telegraph-Journal and its sister paper, the Evening Times-Globe, buzzed with the usual background chatter of the police scanner and clatter of the old teletype printers spewing wire copy and photographs. It was a relatively quiet news day, but I was aware that could change at any moment. Two years earlier I’d witnessed a newsroom responding to the first word of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. It was the only time in my years at the paper I ever heard the order to “stop the presses,” and it left a strong impression of how quickly life can go off the rails, without any warning or any chance to prepare. Normal one moment, irreversibly changed the next.
I was sitting at my desk now, one in a row set sideways to a bank of windows that looked across mud flats near an inlet.
“What’s up?” I asked.
I could hear Mom inhale deeply. She was bracing herself to begin. My interest increased.
“You know so many times in your life I’ve told you that someday I’d be able to explain things,” she began. Yes, it was a refrain I’d grown sick of through my childhood. Why are you crying? I’ll explain when you’re older. Why are we missing school to go bowling in Portage la Prairie today? I’ll tell you someday when you’re old enough. Why do we have to move without telling anyone we’re going? When you’re bigger, I’ll explain. Why can’t we ever tell anyone we’re going on vacation, or even if we’re going out for dinner? Why is everything such a big secret all the time?
Excerpted from Run, Hide, Repeat by Pauline Dakin. Copyright © 2017 by Pauline Dakin. Published by Viking Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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