Pippa's Passing

20. Pippa's Last Chapter

I never saw her again. There were no phone calls or letters or even cards. The last notice was the one I held in my hand in my mother's kitchen telling me she was gone.

For the first two years after she'd told me she was marrying Bastien and moving to Montreal, I bought a new calendar every year and circled our date on the calendar out of an old habit. I stayed on at Merrivale for ten years and took care of my children. Their faces changed every year but they were still all mine. Pippa had done that. In her way, she'd given me these children.

I had a few long-term affairs but nothing lasting. I lived with one woman for two years but there was something missing from the relationship or maybe it was something missing in me. After a decade of teaching in Toronto, I decided it was time for a new future and a new adventure. Bags had become a psychologist and shared a practice with someone. He always offered me free counselling and he kept telling me to find out how big the world was. That's how I ended up in South Korea teaching English as a second language. It was the tonic I needed in my early forties. It didn't fill the hole in me but it was a distraction.

I looked down at the Alumni Magazine and reread the notice of Pippa's passing. She had died on the seventeenth of August. That had only been five days after her forty-third birthday. It was a life cut short.

"What are you reading?"

I snapped out of what had been a long reverie. It was my mother. I'd been lost in my history of Pippa and it took me a moment to snap back into the present.

"Sometimes it doesn't rain but it pours," I offered.

"What are you on about Jeff?"

"Oh, I was just reading in the Alumni Magazine about the death of someone I know."

"Did you know them well?"

"She, mother. Yes, I did. Do you remember when I was in high school and there was that girl whose brother was killed in a motorcycle accident?"

"Oh yes, she came over to the house once didn't she?"

She had been over to the house on more than one occasion but I couldn't tell my mother about those other times.

"Yes, that was the girl. Her name was Pippa Bailey. She married a guy I knew and moved to Montreal."

"Were you good friends?"

How did I answer that?

"You once told me when it came to her to be a friend. You said I should do whatever I could for her and more importantly to try and do whatever she asked me."

"And did you?"

"I like to think I did."

"Then that's all that's important."

I hoped it was.

I took the alumni magazine back to my room along with some of the leftover partially emptied bottles of liquor from my father's celebration of life. There was enough in a handful of them to toast long and hard to my father and Pippa. I passed out with an empty bottle in one hand and the curled-up Alumni Magazine in the other.

I dreamed of her again. It had been a while.

We were dancing together at a celebration of life for her. It was unique that the honoree was still living. All about were people we knew. There was Dr. Bags and Connie and Rod and Rhonda and a young Ben and Sandra. The room was also full of children. Some were my children from classes I'd taught long past as well as Bags' children and Rod and Rhonda's three. Pippa spun off from me as Elvis music was playing in the background and the children danced all around her. This was Pippa as I'd last seen her. She had come to me that time in a brilliant orange dress that seemed all at once to be all the colours of fire blazing and shimmering. The children encircled her while her dress became a real fire and consumed her and blazed into an encompassing funeral pyre. Suddenly Pippa stepped out and she was the girl from the mural at Carlotta's; all young and beautiful. I could hear Elvis and Sinatra singing together on the last refrain of 'Love Me Tender' and Pippa shone all bright and new while they sang "For my darling, I love you and I always will." She extended her hand and called out to me.