When We Were Good

Chapter 2

The beginning was bad. The start of the new year, New Year's Eve. To everyone else it seemed like a miracle that the world hadn't come to an end. It was the year 2000 and everything, Y2K, but all those news reports that told us we should be stockpiling bottled water and canned food turned out to be just another fake scare. The computers figured it all out, and there we were, the same place we'd been in 1999. Only I didn't have a grandmother anymore.

She died during our big family New Year's Eve party. It was awful. While every other person in the world with a television was watching a ball drop and kissing each other and blowing their noisemakers, we were watching Grandma get loaded onto a stretcher in the living room. It was a heart attack, they said, the paramedics in their cargo pants. But she didn't go clutching her chest and moaning and making a big scene. She was graceful, like always, and then she was gone.

We rode to the hospital through streets crowded with people who were, miraculously, all still alive. And Grandma died two days later.

It was a horrible way to start the new year. With the woman who'd pretty much raised me gone, I was in a really bad place. Which is a phrase I've heard so many times that I know it's a cliché, but when your sadness becomes such a constant, heavy part of your life—this blanket laid over top of everything else that smothers anything good so that you're totally blocked off from every other person in the world—your sadness is the bad place. And you can't remember it ever being another way.

I couldn't remember how safe and secure I felt when I was with Grandma. How everything I said seemed important when she was the one listening to me. I couldn't remember the slow, dawning smile that would take over her face when she found me standing on her doorstep, come to visit, to play cards and eat Swiss cheese and avocado on crackers.

I couldn't remember the wonderful things she told me I was: smart and kind and beautiful. All I could think of was that I would never feel her arms—strong, and then weaker as she got older and so did I—wrapped around me again, breathing in her sweet smell of peppermint and Yardley's Lavender.

I had a week or so from the end of the world until school started again. Mom was channeling her grief over her mother's death into work and funeral planning, and Dad was in the middle of some big trade or merger or whatever and was home even less than usual. I don't get my parents' marriage at all. They've been together forever—they met when they were in university—but they have absolutely nothing in common, apart from being superhumanly driven in their careers. I asked my mom once, in a weirdly candid moment after she'd had a couple of glasses of wine, how she knew that Dad was the one when he proposed to her the summer after they graduated. She told me that she didn't, that she had just hoped for the best. What does that say about hope, about anything?

So I was alone in the house, pretty much just crying and reading Grandma's old books and trying to keep some part of her alive inside of me. In four days I read almost everything Alice Munro had ever written. She was Grandma's favourite; her short stories were these perfect little pearl worlds that lured me out of my own head for the few hours that I gave myself over to them completely. I fell asleep more than once face down in Grandma's old hardcover copy of Munro's Selected Stories, long after the words had stopped making sense.

I remembered, vividly, visiting Grandma at her old house—the one she lived in with my grandpa, who died before I was born; the one she lived in before she moved into the old folks' home when I was fifteen, when Mom wouldn't let her come live with us. She'd play with me all day and she'd never lose her patience the way my parents always seemed to. And when we were finished playing, when I was finally exhausted from our imaginary trips to the Sahara and the Amazon, she'd tell me it was time for our books, and we'd sit together in her living room, me with some dumb Baby Sitter's Club book and her with Alice Munro or Margaret Atwood or Jane Urquhart, with a little glass candy dish filled with scotch mints between us. I'd fill my pockets up with the candies before I left, and she'd pretend not to notice. On the ride home with Mom, or sometimes Dad, I'd stuff the mints into my mouth one by one, trying hard to just suck on them, but giving in and biting down hard, the candies' granular coolness filling my mouth. Those were perfect days. But there wouldn't be any more of those.