My name is Heather-Leigh, but Tom calls me Heavenly. Everything's good except that mom has a leaky heart and Kelsey's been away all summer. She came home last month with her new man who’s got the same name as his grandfather, a famous Canadian poet. Meril Byrne. I’ve never read much poetry but I should have heard of him – he was an Okanagan boy.
Me and Tom were drunk on Buster wine when she came home. She came in through the front door and surprised us on the back porch; she must have crept through the house holding his hand, pulling him behind her a little (and he must have noticed the smell of our place in summer: a little sour, a little bit like sickness). She came out through the back door grinning at me with all her teeth, hoppin’ up and down and presenting her man like a model on a game show would present a dishwasher. Her hair was too short. Her eyes were all puffed out because the black flies had got to her out in the bush there, where she worked at a camp for people with problems in their head, and where she met Meril. He was a surprise, nothing like the bruisers she’s brought home before. He was about an inch shorter than her, head shaved clean down to the skin and a thin beard pulled into a long braid that moved up and down when he spoke. He was skinny as hell, but then so is Kelsey, and had a long face, sunny eyes, long hands. He had really defined arm muscles, veiny forearms, hardly any hair. I felt like I was in the presence of a monk. He said “it’s a pleasure to meet you,” to me and Tom and sat down on the top step of the porch. He said pleasure like it really was a pleasure to meet us. Kelsey went back into the house to get him and herself glasses for the Buster wine, and this Meril just looked out over our river, his arms over his knees, his chin rested on his arms, and that braid of his blowing a little in the wind. After some time, with all of us being silent and Kelsey not back with the glasses yet, he said, “do you ever swim in that water?”
“Only if you don’t mind the weeds around your legs,” said Tom, comfortably, as if he’d known this Meril all along. But then again, that’s Tom. It’s never awkward with him.
“We got a paddle boat,” said Tom, “if you ever want to go for a ride, it’s just there, behind the shed there. Kelsey’ll show you how to use it. You steer it with a little joystick.”
“I used one on the Seine.”
Kelsey came out then, with the glasses, and filled them from the plastic bottle we had sitting between us.
“This is Buster wine,” she said. “Our neighbour makes it out of huckleberries.”
Meril smelled the wine like a connoisseur, sipped it, and smacked his lips.
“So what were you doing in Paris?” I asked him.
He looked like he had forgotten that he even mentioned it. Then he looked like he was surprised I knew the Seine was even in Paris. “Oh, god,” he said. He pulled on his braid and smiled at his feet, which I noticed then were bare. Me and Tom leaned back in our chairs, Kelsey gazed at him. “I got mixed up with this woman who thought herself an artiste. We got into all kinds of things. We stayed in Rambuteau and became addicted to kosher falafels. I ended up busking on the Place de la Concorde as a golden Pharoah, like a mummy. I wore an Egyptian mask, this thing with horrible, blank eyes, and wrapped myself in this shiny gold stuff, this satiny material. I stood on a pedestal as still as I could, and bowed for people when they put money in a gold box next to me.”
“Why the hell do that?” asked Tom.
“It was easier than trying to play an instrument.”
Kelsey laughed hard then, slapped the porch and beamed at her man. She liked this one.
“So have you done a lot of travelling then,” said Tom.
“Tell them about New Zealand, Meril,” Kelsey said, and pushed his chest.
“What, all of it?”
“They don’t mind.”
“You kids let me get you something to eat first,” I said. “You must be starving. I’m starving.”
I realised just how gone I was when I tried to stand up, but then again isn’t that always the way, drinking in the afternoon sun until it flies over your house and all that’s left of it is its long legs stretching out on the yard to the river. Me and Tom, we’ll do that sometimes, sit out on a Saturday and just drink. Buster wine or beer or rum n’ cokes. We won’t bother with food and we’ll just smoke his roll-ups, and get slaughtered, and laugh and laugh until we cry. If I’ve got nothing else in this life, I’ll always have these afternoons of recklessness with my husband, and the sound of our screeching, and that look he gets in his eyes when life is good.
I could hear Tom honking out there with those two as I leaned against the counter, eating pistachios out of a jar, looking in the fridge for something to feed them all. Mom called from St Mary’s then, as furious as she was the day we moved her there, a few months prior. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but with her heart she needs 24-hour care and I was beat. She’s only 82. I was too drunk to talk to her.
“You left your bloody sweater here this morning.” Her voice was like acid.
“I knit that for you. You said you had a chill at night because they’ve been leaving the windows open in the common room so I knit that for you. ‘Specially knit that.”
“I’ve got plenty of sweaters.”
“But this was special.”
“I don’t want it. When you leave tomorrow you can take it with you.”
“Fine.”
She hung up. The phone rang again.
“You’ve always been an incredibly fast knitter,” she said, still accusing.
“So what?”
“How did you do this so quickly?”
“You said you had a chill. I wanted you to have my hugs, all the time.” I twisted the phone chord around my body.
“What are you talking about?”
“The sweater. It’s a hug.”
“Well, thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Goodbye.”
“Bye.”
It really wasn’t always like this. It was the thing with the home, and now she’s tried to escape, and we’ve had to call the police. There’s all this water under the bridge now, and it’s all full of turbulence.
I made ham and cheese sandwiches and found some crackers in the cupboard, a bag of oatmeal cookies and washed a bowl of spectacular peaches. The three of them started right in on the food and I had to remind them we were waiting to hear about New Zealand, all of it. Meril took small sips of wine, like he only wet his lips with it, and Kelsey was doing the same. He rubbed his hands together and crossed his legs, and he grinned a few times so that beard of his wagged. Kelsey put her head in his lap and closed her eyes. The soles of her feet were black as the ace of spades. The sun was nearly down.
He traced those big veins of his on his forearms, with these great boxy fingers, as he began to speak. “I was in New Zealand about six years ago; I was 25. I slept in the back of a station wagon in a parking lot next to a marina, up on the west coast of the North Island. I wanted to get a job on a fishing boat; I’d heard they were taking people on, like anyone, you needn’t have fished before. You could go on as a cook, or just a hand to do the grunt work, or clean the fish maybe. I don’t know. I never did get any work on any fishing boat. I had to leave because I’d found out that some beefcakes decided they didn’t like me hanging around the marina. They figured I was plotting something, or maybe it was just weird for them to have some strange foreigner hanging around their town, eating in their greasy spoons. I don’t know.”
“How’d you find out?” asked Tom, genuinely concerned. “Who were these guys?”
“Oh, people would say things to me in passing, quietly. Then they’d act like they hadn’t said anything at all. It took me a few weeks to realise this place was like the Twighlight Zone. It wasn’t a big deal. I took my station wagon down to Auckland, and it didn’t take long to find some work there.”
Kelsey opened her eyes and grinned up at him, and tugged at his braid. She took off her glasses and laid them on her chest.
“Your poor eyes,” he said to her, and kissed her nose. “They still look so sore.”
“So what job did you get?” I asked.
He looked at me and I could tell he was deciding whether or not he wanted to tell me. “I’ll tell you, but you can’t make any judgements.”
I held my glass of Buster wine towards him, and he reciprocated with a clink of his glass, still barely touched.
“I stayed in one of those backpacker hostels. This one, people were staying there for months. They were mostly from England, some other Canadians, some Germans. Mostly English. And they were mad for drugs. They were working the shittiest jobs, like in butcher shops or pubs, or meat pie stands. Really degrading stuff. Then they’d go and spend all their money on drugs, and complain that they had no money left over to travel with. I found myself in a pub with this English guy, from up north England, and he introduced me to this Kiwi called Max who he knew from his job on a building site. Me and this guy Max got to talking and by the end of the night I’d agreed to sell acid for him at the hostel – all the hostels.”
“LSD dad,” said Kelsey, and Tom nodded his thankyou.
“Was the money good?” Tom asked, and that’s how I knew he was really gone, because he wouldn’t have been so bold to act that cool if he were sober.
Meril smiled at him, grinned at him, and nodded yes. “It was great, until some guys ratted on me. I was arrested and spent nine months in the Auckland penitentiary.”
“No,” said Tom, aghast, and drained his glass. “That must have been really something.”
“It was,” said Meril.
“What was that like?” I asked, and looked at Kelsey to make sure this was a suitable question.
“I met some really beautiful people. Some really sound guys. I spent a lot of my evenings singing with a group of Maori fellas – they call each other fella – and I studied Buddhism with a Japanese guy.”
“Meril is a Buddhist,” said Kelsey. “He’s teaching me all about it.”
Now here was something new altogether, yet I was still back at the Eiffel Tower or wherever it was, trying to picture him as a golden Pharaoh, bowing for coins.

Because of the heat, Kelsey and Meril decided to sleep in the sun room at the back of the house. It was a little awkward there sometime around midnight, when I woke up and heard them making love. I’ve never heard my daughter’s fucking sounds before, why would I, I guess, and I have to say I was moved. She sounded like she was having a hell of a passion, and I could hear the way her voice excited him. I turned to Tom, to see if I could rouse him, play with him, but the Buster wine had him instead.

That Meril was already up before me, sitting at the edge of the river with his shirt off, trying to eat a crab apple. I came down and sat next to him, and laughed my ass off when I saw what he was trying to do.
“Tell me you know what a crab apple is,” I said, taking it from him, perhaps a little more violently than I needed to. “You don’t eat these, you nincompoop.”
“Nincompoop?” he said, and splashed me. “Who uses the word nincompoop?”
“You sleep well?” I asked him, and my cheeks burned at the thought of it.
“It’s like sleeping outside, that room.”
The sun was shining in our eyes and we had to squint. It bounced off the river in flints and reflected off our faces. This Meril had nice blue eyes, and he just kept smiling, and he was happy.
“So how’d you meet my daughter?”
“At the camp. We were in the same raft.”
“Like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn?”
He smiled, pondered the implication, and said no. “Whitewater rafting. Down the Golden. She steered the boat. Grade three rapids too you know – no small chickens.”
“Where’d my daughter learn to drive a ship in the rapids?”
“They taught her, at the camp. They’ve really got it together at this place.”
“For people with problems in their head,” I said.
He spoke to the water. “They encourage teamwork, initiative, trust. It’s all about setting tasks and getting them done, and building confidence. Operating within a community where everyone is as crazy as everyone else. It’s a trip man, I’m telling you.”
“So you like working there?”
He put his hand on his chest and feigned surprise, and laughed, and said, “I’m one of the campers, dahling. I’m as crazy as snow in July!” He said July like Juw-lai, like he was from the Dukes of Hazards.
I looked at him sideways, and waited for the guffaw, or a slap on the back, or any indication that would tell me whether or not he was serious, but he was already pulling himself up, asking for something to eat.

A couple of days passed with me not knowing whether or not he was crazy; it was impossible to tell. I couldn’t get Kelsey to leave his side without it being too obvious. And he was so full of these incredible stories. We’d all be sitting around on the porch with a couple of beers, or watching television and eating cinnamon toast, and he’d break in with some story about some country he visited. He once lived on an island in Honduras, Roatan, and he lived with this woman he’d met scuba diving. She was his instructor. She fell in love with him, he said, and asked him to stay at her house for a while. So he did. She was a marvel, he said. She was Spanish, and she could speak English, French, Yugoslavian and a bit of Chinese. She played guitar in one of the drinking holes and where her voice didn’t suffice, her humour kicked in. Well, he came home late one night, middle of the night, and walked into the bedroom, or maybe it was the kitchen, only to find her standing there, pointing a gun at his head. He said she was like driftwood. She’d left Spain so many years before, and she’d travelled so much, too much, she’d lost her base. She’d been robbed at this house a few months before I guess, they took everything, and she was terrified. He didn’t know that, until he came in and found his nose up against the barrel of her gun. He said he couldn’t really live with her after that, and it was sad, as he figured she had a lot of people moving in and out of her life. And she’d moved in and out of a lot of the lives of others.
Well I can’t really fathom that, losing my base. These roots are deep. This was my mother’s house. The furthest I’ve been is Toronto, and that was a five-hour flight from Vancouver so I’m thinking that’s pretty far. And I’ve made plenty of trips down into Montana, through the canyons near Glacier National Park, to hang out at Red’s (Tom’s brother) cabin in Whitefish. Go skiing or swimming, depending on the time of year. But I’ve never been without family, whether it’s Tom or mom or one of my kids. Can’t imagine that. That poor little Spanish girl, cooped up with all those languages and no one to speak them to. Mental note: look up Roatan in our Atlas.

I don’t know what Meril said to mom when Kelsey took him to visit her, but he sure stirred things up. This is the phone conversation I had with her a few hours after his visit:
“I’m going on a trip,” she said to me.
“Are you now. Where are you going?”
“I’ve always, always wanted to see the Pyramids.”
“Well, everyone has always wanted to see the Pyramids.”
“What difference does that make? I want to go.”
“You need 24-hour care mom. Who’s going to take care of you? You can’t go to the grocery store without your oxygen.”
“So it’ll be the last thing I do.”
I put the phone to my boobs and took a deep breath, prayed to the ceiling fan, and continued. “Now, did you want me to bring you anything tomorrow morning?”
“Do I have a valid passport? Can you look in my dresser, top drawer. I think it might have expired.”
“Mom, it expired sometime in the seventies.”
“That doesn’t matter. I’m still a citizen. I can get a new one.”
“Mom, Meril told you some of his stories, didn’t he? He’s had quite the life, that Meril, hasn’t he?”
“And he’s got no regrets,” she said.
“Regrets? What regrets do you have?”
I heard her sniffling over the line. I knew her bottom lip was trembling, and her wrinkled hand, dappled with veins and blotched like water marks on the ceiling, was tight over the receiver. It was all muffles and sniffles for a good minute.
“I just want to see the Pyramids,” she said. “I don’t need to explain it to you.”

I watched that Meril at dinner. No way was he crazy. Me and Tom, we were taken with him, almost as much as Kelsey was.
“I spent a few months in Australia before I went to New Zealand, eh?” Meril started.
“You didn’t hang out in the Sydney jail I hope,” said Tom.
“Tell us a nice story Meril,” I urged. “Surely you’ve seen something beautiful? Have you ever seen the Pyramids?”
His eyes brightened and he put down his fork. “Your mom was talking about that today!”
“I know she was. She thinks she’s going to go see them now. You lit some fire under her ass.”
“I think we should help her,” said Kelsey. The puff was almost gone from her eyes now, but she looked tired.
“It would kill her,” I said, “and don’t bloody say ‘so what’. I know so what. She’ll live for a few more years.”
“We could take her,” Meril piped up.
Kelsey looked shocked; she put her hand over his hand. She smiled like she thought that was a bad idea. I didn’t want to talk about it anyway, and I’d made this nice rhubarb crisp, and Tom had made ice cream, so we ate dessert. And I didn’t sleep much in the night.

I was having a cold bath on the Saturday night. It was too hot to do anything else. Kelsey came in and sat on the toilet, started clipping her dirty toenails into the wastepaper basket. This was her way. She didn’t say anything and waited for me to start talking.
“Why’d you cut your hair so short?” I began.
“Easier.”
“That camp is rough on you.”
She turned around and pulled the wash cloth off the side of the tub, gestured for me to sit up so she could scrub my back. “It’s so good there mom. People really, all people want to do is make others feel good about themselves. Meril, he’s so amazing at getting people psyched up.”
“Like convincing mom she should go to friggin’ Egypt.”
“I would take her you know,” said Kelsey. “But with both of them – I’d be the one on medication.”
I grabbed the side of the tub and looked up at her. “So he really is a camper then eh?”
“He told me he told you, but I thought you would have cornered me about it days ago.”
“I’m not sure that it really bothers me.”
“I’m never sure what to believe.”
“What?”
“He likes to tell stories.”
“Well that’s obvious.”
“No. I mean, all these places he’s been to, I’m not sure it’s anything more than bits and pieces he’s picked up from other people.”
“He’s a liar?”
Kelsey grinned then, and she had tears in her eyes. “I’m not sure that it really bothers me!” She laughed again then, and pulled at the neck of her t-shirt and looked down at her boobs. “Heavenly, tell me these tits aren’t going to sag like yours.”
She wanted to divert me then, and I wanted to talk about it more. But she’d moved on. She’s like her dad in that respect, so I left it, grabbed the pumice stone and went to work on my elbows and heels. That was the last we talked about it anyway because they left the next day. They confessed that they were only allowed a weekend away instead of a whole week, and there was going to be a bit of hell to pay when they got back. That Meril gave us a gift of crab-apple people; he’d done it well too. He scrounged bits and pieces from the kitchen – toothpicks, steel wool, cloves, a terrycloth, caraway and mustard seeds, a few broom hairs – and made a fat old couple with a jug of Buster wine between them. For the Buster wine, he used the cap from an Ajax bottle. He told me he’d learned how to make apple people from a guy who mended his shoes once in Mexico City. Great imagination that Meril, Mexico City or not.
As per usual, I felt like I was being ripped apart when Kelsey left. They wanted to hitch to the bus station, so we walked them up to Highway 6 and waited until they caught a lift. She hasn’t lived at home since she was 17, well that’s not true – she’s come home for a few months here and there to help when mom got really bad. But if you asked me how many addresses and jobs she’s gone through in that time, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I would think it’s somewhere in the twenties? Tom wouldn’t even proffer a guess.

I think it was about a week after they left that St Mary’s called me to say mom had run away. We called the police right away and by chance, they found mom at the bus station, half suffocated and delirious. So we didn’t really sick the cops on her, as she now will have anyone who will listen believe. An officer was at the bus station anyway and was alerted to her by the Quick Snack man who found her sweating and panting by the drinks fridge. When I got to the hospital she was hooked up to a couple of things, but she was bright as a Christmas tree, propped up and pissed off. Tom sat in a chair by the window while I fritted around her. There were other patients in the room, older and sicker, and the smell, one I always associate with the old and infirm, was like boiled chicken.
“Do you feel like telling me what happened mom?” I asked.
“I was trying to get to Vancouver to renew my passport.”
“I told you you couldn’t go anywhere without your oxygen.”
“And I told you it’ll be the last trip I do.”
That friggin’ Meril, I thought. I considered telling her the truth about him, but it only would have been to hurt her. They brought mom the prescribed soft lunch of rice pudding, overboiled carrots and pureed beef. She ignored it, which meant she was really and truly pissed off.
“I’m not a prisoner,” she said to me, and she looked at Tom. He nodded his agreement, but shrugged his shoulders too.
“Well look how far you got mom. How did you get to the bus station anyway?”
“Hitched.” She looked up, tried to cup her tears so they wouldn’t fall. “It’s so boring getting old.”

Mom and I have struck a deal now. I’ve sent away for passport applications, for her, Tom and myself. We’re each going to have one, which means we at least have the option of going to the Pyramids, whether we actually do it or not.