As soon as she saw Dad, she left to call an ambulance. I stayed with him while she made the call, but as soon as she came back, she told me to leave the room.
Christie was asleep in the next room. I stood and watched her, listening to my dad’s breathing grow worse and Nan talk in a voice I’d never heard her use. “Garry,” she said, a little louder than normal. “The ambulance is coming. You’re having an asthma attack. Keep calm, Garry. Stay with me.”
Christie woke up from the noise and started crying. “Dad doesn’t feel well, Christie,” I said, trying to sound strong like Nan. “But people are coming to help.”
I raced across the hallway to open the door as soon as I heard the ambulance pull up outside. I watched as the paramedics carried a stretcher and breathing apparatus up the set of stairs. And I looked on in silence as Mum rushed into the house a few minutes later. I listened to the sound of Mum’s sobbing coming from the bedroom, not understanding what it meant. When they wheeled Dad out a while later, I didn’t want to look at him. He was still struggling to breathe, and his head was shaking. I could hear the noise of one of the wheels under the stretcher as it squeaked along.
I followed everyone outside, where the streetlights and headlights and blinking hazard lights all made the night look out of time. As the medics were loading Dad into the back of the ambulance, he told Mum he loved her. I stood by Nan’s side, the grass cold against my bare feet. “Things will be okay,” said Nan. I didn’t know who she was speaking to.
Christie, Nan, and I stayed back while Mum went off with Dad in the ambulance. I don’t know how long we were alone, or even what we did. But I remember that it was around midnight when the front door finally opened. Mum came in with a doctor beside her. Neither of them had to say anything at all. Nan and I both knew what had happened. Soon Mum, Nan, and I were crying. Not long after, the phone started ringing. Nan answered, her voice low, the calls never lasting more than a few minutes. When the doorbell rang and the first neighbours arrived and hugged Mum tight, I disappeared to my room.
On the day of the funeral, I watched as Dad’s coffin was wheeled toward the hearse. I broke free from Mum’s hand on my shoulder and ran out to stop it. I draped as much of myself as I could around the timber box, but it was no use. My arms couldn’t reach all the way around. When my sobbing got so hard that it hurt my chest, someone peeled me away.
2
Soon after Dad’s death, Mum moved downstairs, where Nan took care of her and Christie and me. It was as if Mum became a child again, and in doing so she couldn’t be a mum to us anymore.
I may have been just a nine-year-old kid, but any fool could have spotted the signs. The day I walked in on her in her bedroom, tears barely dry on her cheeks, confirmed the fact that she wasn’t coping.
That was a few weeks after Dad’s death. It took a few months for me to find out that her troubles were not just caused by grief. She and I were in the kitchen one evening. She was cleaning—a new obsession that had started recently—and I was sitting at the table reading.
“Dion,” she said, “Garry wasn’t your dad.”
I don’t remember crying or running off to hide. I don’t remember shouting or screaming or asking my mum to explain further. I have no memory of what I said next. I have no recall of how I felt. A blank void exists where so many memories should be. I can only imagine how painful that news must have been for me to wipe all trace of it from my mind.
But what I know for sure is that the wound that had been inflicted on me by my dad’s—Garry’s—death became so deep that it changed everything about me.
Even today my mum will cry when she and I talk about Garry’s death. She’ll say it took only a twenty-minute ambulance ride for everything in our lives to change. She’s right, but she’s also wrong: it might have taken minutes for life to be thrown into chaos, but it took only four words for my grieving heart to be ripped completely apart.
I held tight to my secret. Within a year or two of finding out the truth about myself, I was ashamed of my past: not only was I the kid without a dad at home, but I was the only one I knew who also had a single parent. The regular stream of visitors that poured in after the funeral had long since stopped, and our dwindling finances forced Mum to go out and find work. Whenever she was at home, she spent hours repeatedly cleaning the house and listening to Lionel Richie songs played loudly on the stereo in the pristine dining room.
In my mind, it seemed like all my friends came from perfect families, and because they all went to church, I’d take myself on Sundays as well. I wanted to feel as though I belonged, and I also liked the fact that I could help myself to a handful of small cakes after the service. I didn’t mind the sermons so much—sometimes they even made me feel better about myself. But the way people responded to me, as I hovered near the tea table at the end of the service, made it clear to me that they saw me differently from everyone else. I could hear them whispering behind my back. As soon as I turned around, the awkward silence and fake smiles would come out.
Mum started getting phone calls as well. I’d try to creep out into the hallway and watch as she stood, her face turned to the wall, shoulders hunched. Her words were clipped and the calls short, and sometimes when they were over, she’d turn around and see me watching and tell me about the latest gossip people were spreading about us in the town.
Soon enough I encountered the ostracism myself. When I went to a friend’s house to visit one Saturday afternoon, I could see his bike on the grass out front, so I knew he was in. His mum, however, said he couldn’t come out to play.
“You can’t see Dan,” she said, pulling the screen door closed between us.
“Why not, Mrs. Carruthers?”
“You’re a bad influence, Dion. We don’t want you coming around.”
I walked away devastated. I didn’t drink, swear, act up at school, or get into trouble with the police. Okay, so I was a little greedy with the small cakes at church, but other than that I was always polite and tried to be kind.
She could only have been referring to one thing.
I didn’t have a name for it at the time, but I quickly developed a strong dislike for being made to feel I was being excluded. By the time I was fourteen, I was well aware of precisely where I belonged in life: on the outside.